A summer in Skye, Volume 2 (of 2)

The house of my friend Mr M'Ian is set down on the shore of one of the great Lochs that intersect the island; and as it was built in smuggling times, its windows look straight down the Loch towards the open sea. Consequently at night, when lighted up, it served all the purposes of a lighthouse: and the candle in the porch window, I am told, has often been anxiously watched by the rough crew engaged in running a cargo of claret or brandy from Bordeaux. Right opposite, on the other side of the Loch, is the great rugged fringe of the Cuchullin hills; and lying on the dry summer grass you can see it, under the influence of light and shade, change almost as the expression of a human face changes. Behind the house the ground is rough and broken, every hollow filled, every knoll plumaged with birches, and between the leafy islands, during the day, rabbits scud continually, and in the evening they sit in the glades and wash their innocent faces. A mile or two back from the house a glen opens into soft green meadows, through which a stream flows; and on these meadows Mr M'Ian, when the weather permits, cuts and secures his hay. The stream is quiet enough usually, but after a heavy day's rain, or when a waterspout has burst up among the hills, it comes down with a vengeance, carrying everything before it. On such occasions its roar may be heard a mile away. [Sidenote: View from the bridge.] About a pistol-shot from the house the river is crossed by a plank bridge, and in fine weather it is a great pleasure to sit down there and look about one. The stream flows sluggishly over rocks, in the deep places of a purple or port-wine colour, and lo! behind you, through the arch, slips a sunbeam, and just beneath the eye there gleams a sudden chasm of brilliant amber. The sea is at ebb, and the shore is covered with stones and dark masses of sea-weed; and the rocks a hundred yards off--in their hollows they hold pools of clear sea-water in which you can find curious and delicately-coloured ocean blooms--are covered with orange lichens, which contrast charmingly with the masses of tawny dulse and the stone-littered shore on the one side, and the keen blue of the sea on the other. Beyond the blue of the sea the great hills rise, with a radiant vapour flowing over their crests. Immediately to the left a spur of high ground runs out to the sea edge,--the flat top smooth and green as a billiard table, the sheep feeding on it white as billiard balls,--and at the foot of this spur of rock a number of huts are collected. They are half lost in an azure veil of smoke, you smell the peculiar odour of peat reek, you see the nets lying out on the grass to dry, you hear the voices of children. Immediately above, and behind the huts and the spur of high ground, the hill falls back, the whole breast of it shaggy with birch-wood; and just at the top you see a clearing and a streak of white stony road, leading into some other region as solitary and beautiful as the one in which you at present are. And while you sit on the bridge in a state of half-sleepy contentment--a bee nuzzling in a bell-shaped flower within reach of your stick, the sea-gulls dancing silent quadrilles overhead, the white lightning flash of a rabbit from copse to copse twenty yards off--you hear a sharp whistle, then a shout, and looking round there is M'Ian himself standing on a height, his figure clear against the sky: and immediately the men tinkering the boat on the shore drop work and stand and stare, and out of the smoke that wraps the cottages rushes bonnetless, Lachlan Dhu, or Donald Roy, scattering a brood of poultry in his haste, and marvelling much what has moved his master to such unwonted exertion.

My friend's white house is a solitary one, no other dwelling of the same kind being within eight miles of it. In winter, wind and rain beat it with a special spite; and the thunder of the sea creeps into your sleeping ears, and your dreams are of breakers and reefs, and ships going to pieces, and the cries of drowning men. In summer, it basks as contentedly on its green knoll; green grass, with the daisy wagging its head in the soft wind, runs up to the very door of the porch. But although solitary enough--so solitary; that if you are asked to dine with your nearest neighbour you must mount and ride--there are many more huts about than those we have seen nestling on the shore beneath the smooth green plateau on which sheep are feeding. If you walk along to the west,--and a rough path it is, for your course is over broken boulders,--you come on a little bay with an eagle's nest of a castle perched on a cliff, and there you will find a school-house and a half-a-dozen huts, the blue smoke steaming out of the crannies in the walls and roofs. Dark pyramids of peat are standing about, sheep and cows are feeding on the bits of pasture, gulls are weaving their eternal dances above, and during the day the school-room is murmuring like a beehive--only a much less pleasant task than the making of honey is going on within. [Sidenote: The pensioner.] Behind the house to the east, hidden by the broken ground and the masses of birch-wood, is another collection of huts; and in one of these lives the most interesting man in the place. He is an old pensioner, who has seen service in different quarters of the world; and frequently have I carried him a string of pigtail, and shared his glass of usquebaugh, and heard him, as he sat on a stone in the sunshine, tell tales of barrack life in Jamaica; of woody wildernesses filled with gorgeous undergrowth, of parasites that climbed like fluttering tongues of fire, and of the noisy towns of monkeys and parrots in the upper branches. I have heard him also severely critical on the different varieties of rum. Of every fiery compound he had a catholic appreciation, but rum was his special favourite--being to him what a Greek text was to Person, or an old master to Sir George Beaumont. So that you see, although Mr M'Ian's house was in a sense solitary, yet it was not altogether bereaved of the sight and sense of human habitations. On the farm there were existing perhaps, women and children included, some sixty souls; and to these the relation of the master was peculiar, and perhaps without a parallel in the island.

[Sidenote: Rude courts of justice.]

When, nearly half-a-century ago, Mr M'Ian left the army and became tacksman, he found cotters on his farm, and thought their presence as much a matter of course as that limpets should be found upon his rocks. They had their huts, for which they paid no rent; they had their patches of corn and potato ground, for which they paid no rent. There they had always been, and there, so far as Mr M'Ian was concerned, they would remain. He had his own code of generous old-fashioned ethics, to which he steadily adhered; and the man who was hard on the poor, who would dream of driving them from the places in which they were born, seemed to him to break the entire round of the Commandments. Consequently the huts still smoked on the hem of the shore and among the clumps of birch-wood. The children who played on the green when he first became tacksman grew up in process of time, and married; and on these occasions he not only sent them something on which to make merry withal, but he gave them--what they valued more--his personal presence; and he made it a point of honour, when the ceremony was over, to dance the first reel with the bride. When old men or children were sick, cordials and medicines were sent from the house; when old man or child died, Mr M'Ian never failed to attend the funeral. He was a Justice of the Peace; and when disputes arose amongst his own cotters, or amongst the cotters of others--when, for instance, Katy M'Lure accused Effie M'Kean of stealing potatoes; when Red Donald raged against Black Peter on some matter relating to the sale of a dozen lambs; when Mary, in her anger at the loss of her sweetheart, accused Betty (to whom said sweetheart had transferred his allegiance) of the most flagrant breaches of morality--the contending parties were sure to come before my friend; and many a rude court of justice I have seen him hold at the door of his porch. Arguments were heard pro and con, witnesses were examined, evidence was duly sifted and weighed, judgment was made, and the case dismissed; and I believe these decisions gave in the long run as much satisfaction as those delivered in Westminster or the Edinburgh Parliament-House. Occasionally, too, a single girl or shepherd, with whose character liberties were being taken, would be found standing at the porch-door anxious to make oath that they were innocent of the guilt or the impropriety laid to their charge. Mr M'Ian would come out and hear the story, make the party assert his or her innocence on oath, and deliver a written certificate to the effect that in his presence, on such and such a day, so and so had sworn that certain charges were unfounded, false, and malicious. Armed with this certificate, the aspersed girl or shepherd would depart in triumph. He or she had passed through the ordeal by oath, and nothing could touch them farther.