Matheson Collection > Popular tales of the west Highlands > Volume 1

INTRODUCTION. Iv
fir-cone, somewhere abroad. It grew to be a pine tree ;
it must have been white with snow in winter, and
green in summer, and glittering with rain drops and
hoar-frost in bright sunshine at various times and sea-
sons. The number of years it stood in the forest can
be counted by the rings in the wood. It is certain that
it was torn up by the roots, for the roots are there still.
It may have formed a part of one of these wonderful natu-
ral rafts of the Mississippi, of which one in 1816 was " no
less than ten miles in length, two hundred and twenty
yards wide, and eight feet deep."* It has been to warm
seas, and has worn a marine dress of green and brown since
it lost its own natural dress of green branches. Birds
must have sat on it in the forest, — crabs and shells
have lived on it at sea, and fish must have swam about
it ; and yet it is now a rafter, hung with black pen-
dants of peat smoke. A tree that grew beside it may
now be in Spitzbergen amongst walrusses. Another
may be a snag in the Mississippi amongst alligators,
destined to become a fossil tree in a coal field. Part
of another may be a Yankee rocking chair, or it may
be part of a ship in any part of the World, or the tram
of a cart, or bit of a carriage, or a wheel-barrow, or a
gate post, or anything that can be made of fir wood
anywhere ; and the fate of stories may be as various as
that of fir trees, but their course may be guessed at by
running a back scent overland, as I have endeavoured
to follow the voyage of a drift log over sea.
-)(- Macphie's story began thus : — " There was a poor old
fisher in Skye, and his name was Duncan ; " and every
version of the story which I have found in the High-
lands, and I have found many, is as highland as the
peat-reek on the rafters. The same story is known in
* Lyell's Principles of Geology, p. 267.