Matheson Collection > Popular tales of the west Highlands > Volume 4

4 POSTSCRIPT.
here for much valuable information. My work has been
treated as an honest attempt to place what I found
amongst Highland peasants within the reach of English
readers ; and if I have got an occasional buffet, such
pain does but enhance the pleasure of being patted on
the back. Some have added praise which I can hardly
think my due, and of which I would willingly transfer
a large share to those who have really earned it. The
real workmen are the old Highland bodies, with their
extraordinary power of memory, who told Gaelic
stories, and the men who wrote them down — men who
have shown an amount of industry, talent, and fidelity,
in carrying out their work, of which I cannot speak too
highly, and whose genuine, kindly, generous, clannish
nature, has made it a real pleasure to work with them.
" Sir," said one of them, " I send you the story of
, which I wrote from the dictation of .
I am paid enough already." And yet these are the
people of whom one of a different stamp lately said
that they were barbarians to be civilized, a people
whose language should be rooted out as the worst of all
the jargons inflicted upon the human race as a curse at
the tower of Babel.