Blair Collection > Popular tales of the West Highlands > Volume 1

XXIV INTRODUCTIOK'.
generations. If you can claim coiisinship with any, slie
is your friend ; but she will praise the ancestors and
tell of the adventures of Eob Eoy the Gregorach, the
last of the freebooters. " But Mary can you say
Murachag and Mionachag 1 " " Huch ! my dear, that is
an ursgeul that is nonsense. The Good Being bless you,
I knew your grandmother," etc. etc. So one must rest
contented with the fact, that old Mary knows one tale,
and probably many more, which a week's persuasion
might perhaps extract.
Or it may be a jaretty lass, whose eye twinkles
with intelligence at every catch-word, thrown out as a
bait, but whom nothing will ind\;ce to confess that she
knows the foolish tales which the minister has con-
demned.
Or it is an old wandering vagabond of a tinker, who
has no roof but the tattered covering of his tent. He
has pitched it in a quarry under a giant fir, the gnarled
roots, half bare, hardly support the tree on the edge of
a red clay bank, and form a kind of hollow, a " cos," in
which the tinker and his tribe have nestled at odd times
for years. A thin blue smoke is curling amongst the
blackened roots, and winding itself about the noble tree.
A stately mansion and a wide domain, and a blue
highland loch, with a shoal of brown herring-boats, can
be seen through the wood from the door of the tinker's
tent ; and there he Hes, an old man past eighty, who
has been a soldier, and " has never seen a school ; " too
proud to beg, too old to work ; surrounded by boxes
and horn spoons, with shaggy hair and naked feet, as
perfect a nomad as the wildest Lapp or Arab in the
whole world. It is easy to make friends with such
men. A kind word in their native language is all that
is required, but to get their stories is another affair.
"Donald, did you ever see the like of this?" Up