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

Ixii INTRODUCTION.
and sleeps in the common room, as a peasant does. The
cock sleeps on the rafters, the sheep on the floor, the
bull behind the door. A ladder is a pole, with pegs
stuck through it. Horses put their noses "into"
bridles. When all Ireland passes in review before
the princess, they go in at the front door and out at
the back, as they would through a bothy ; and even
that unexplained personage, the daughter of the king
of the skies, has maids who chatter to her as freely as
maids do to Highland mistresses. When the prince is
at death's door for love of the beautiful lady in the
swan's down robe, and the queen mother is in despair,
she goes to the kitchen to talk over the matter.
The tales represent the actual, every-day life of those
who tell them, with great fidelity. They have done
the same, in all likelihood, time out of mind, and that
which is not true of the present is, in all probability,
true of the pastj and therefore something may be
learned of forgotten ways of life.
If much is of home growth, if the fight with the
dragon takes place at the end of a dark, quiet Highland
loch, where real whales actually blow and splash, there
are landscapes which are not painted from nature, as
she is seen in the Isles, and these may be real pictiu-es
seen long ago by our ancestors. Men ride for days
through forests, though the men who tell of them live
in small islands, Avhere there are only drift trees and
bog pine. There are traces of foreign or forgotten
laws or customs. A man buys a Avife as he would a
cow, and acquires a right to shoot her, which is acknow-
ledged as good law.
Caesar tells of the Gauls, that " men have the power
of life and death over their wives, as well as their
children." It appears that an Icelandic betrothal was