you approach, it disappears with a quick, short bleat, and a hurry of tiny hooves. Wonderful mystery of instinct! Affection all the more touching that it is so wrapt in darkness, hardly knowing its own meaning! For nights and nights the creatures will be found haunting about these turfen walls, seeking the young that have been taken away.

But my chief delight here is my friend and neighbor, Mr. MacIan. He was a soldier in his youth is now very old, ninety and odd, I should say. He would strike one with a sense of strangeness in a city, and among men of the present generation. Here, however, he creates no surprise; he is a natural product of the region, like the red heather, or the bed of the dried torrent. He is a master of legendary lore. He knows the history of every considerable family in the island; he circulates like sap through every genealogical tree; he is an enthusiast in Gaelic poetry, and is fond of reciting compositions of native bards, his eyes lighted up, and his tongue moving glibly over the rugged clots of consonants. He has a servant cunning upon the pipes, and, dwelling there for a week, I heard Ronald often wandering near the house, solacing himself with their music; now a plaintive love-song, now a coronach for chieftain borne to his grave, now a battle march, the notes of which, melancholy and monotonous at first, would all at once soar into a higher strain, and then hitrry and madden as beating time to the footsteps of the charging clan. I am the fool of association; and the tree under which a king has rested, the stone in which a banner was planted on the morning of some victorious or disas trous day, the house in which some great man first saw the light, are to me the sacredest things. This slight, gray, keen-eyed man the scabbard sorely frayed now, the blade sharp and bright as ever- - gives me a thrill like an old coin with its half obliterated effigy, a Druid stone on a

moor, a stain of blood on the floor of a palace. He stands before me a living figure, and history groups itself behind by way of background. He sits at the same board with me, and yet he lifted Moore at Corunna, and saw the gallant dying eyes flash up with their last pleasure when the Highlanders charged past. He lay down to sleep in the light of Wellington's watch-fires in the gorges of the piny Pyrenees; around him roared the death thunders of Waterloo. There is a certain awfulness about very old men ; they are amongst us, but not of us. They crop out of the living soil and herbage of to-day, like rocky strata bearing marks of the glacier or the wave. Their roots strike deeper than ours, and they draw sustenance from an earlier layer of soil. They are lonely amongst the young; they cannot form new friendships, and are willing to be gone. They feel the "sublime attractions of the grave"; for the soil of churchyards once flashed kind eyes on them, heard with them the chimes at midnight, sang and clashed the brimming goblet with them; and the present Tom and Harry are as nothing to the Tom and Harry that swaggered about and toasted the reigning belles seventy years ago. We are accustomed to lament the shortness of life; but it is wonderful how long it is notwithstanding. Often a single life, like a summer twilight, connects two historic days. Count back four lives, and King Charles is kneeling on the scaffold at Whitehall. To hear Maclan speak, one could not help thinking in this way. In a short run across the mainland with him this summer, we reached Culloden Moor. The old gentleman with a mournful air- - for he is a great Jacobite, and wears the Prince's hair in a ringpointed out the burial-grounds of the clans. Struck with his manner, I inquired how he came to know their red resting-places. As if hurt, he drew himself up, laid his hand on my shoulder, saying, "Those who put them in told me." Heavens, how a century and odd years collapsed,

For a whole evening he

and the bloody field, the battle-smoke not yet cleared away, and where Cumberland's artillery told the clansmen sleeping in thickest swaths, unrolled itself from the horizon down to my very feet! will sit and speak of his London life; and I cannot help contrasting the young officer, who trod Bond Street with powder in his hair at the end of last century, with the old inan living in the shadow of Blavin now.

Dwellers in cities have occasionally seen a house that has the reputation of being haunted, and heard a ghost story told. Most of them have knowledge of the trumpet-blast that sounds when a member of the Airlie family is about to die. Some few may have heard of the Irish gentleman who, seated in the London opera-house on the night his brother died, heard above the clash of the orchestra and the passion of the singers, the shrill warning keen of the banshee, —an evil omen always to him and his. City people laugh when these stories are told, even although the blood should run chill the while. Here, one is steeped in a ghostly atmosphere men walk about here gifted with the second sight. There has been something weird and uncanny about the island for some centuries. Douglas, on the morning of Otterbourne, according to the ballad, was shaken unto superstitious fears:

"But I hae dreamed a dreary dream,

Beyond the Isle of Skye ;

I saw a dead man win a fight,

And I think that man was I."

Then the island is full of strange legends of the Norwegian times and earlier, legends it might be worth Mr. Dasent's while to take note of, should he ever visit the rainy Hebrides. One such legend, concerning Ossian and his poems, struck me a good deal. Near Mr. MacIan's place is a ruined castle, a mere hollow shell of a building, Dunscaith by name, built in Fingalian days by the chieftain

cry

Cuchullin, and so called in honor of his wife. The pile crumbles over the sea on a rocky headland bearded by gray green lichens. The place is quite desolate, and seldom visited. The only sounds heard there are the sharp whistle of the salt breeze, the bleat of a strayed sheep, the of wheeling sea-birds. MacIan and myself sat one summer day on the ruined stair. The sea lay calm and bright beneath, its expanse broken only by a creeping sail. Across the loch rose the great red hill, in the shadow of which Boswell got drunk; on the top of which is perched the Scandinavian woman's cairn. And out of the bare blue heaven, down on the ragged fringe of the Coolin hills, flowed a great white vapor gathering in the sunlight in mighty fleece on fleece. The old gentleman was the narrator, and the legend goes as follows: - The castle was built by Cuchullin and his Fingalians in a single night. The chieftain had many retainers, was a great hunter, and terrible in war. Every night at feast the minstrel Ossian sang his exploits. Ossian, on one occasion, in wandering among the hills, was struck by sweet strains of music that seemed to issue from a green knoll on which the sun shone temptingly. He sat down to listen, and was lulled asleep by the melody. He had no sooner fallen asleep than the knoll opened, and he beheld the under-world of the fairies. That afternoon and the succeeding night he spent in revelry, and in the morning he was allowed to return. Again the music sounded, again the senses of the minstrel were steeped in forgetfulness. And on the sunny knoll he awoke a grayhaired man; for in one short fairy afternoon and evening had been crowded a hundred of our human years. In his absence, the world had entirely changed, the Fingalians were extinct, and the dwarfish race, whom we call men, were possessors of the country. Longing for companionship, Ossian married the daughter of a shepherd, and in process of time a little girl was born to him. Years passed

on; his wife died, and his daughter, woman grown now,

married a pious man, for the people were Christianized by this time,called, from his love of psalmody, Peter of the Psalms. Ossian, blind with age, went to reside with his daughter and her husband. Peter was engaged all day in hunting, and when he came home at evening, and when the lamp was lighted, Ossian, sitting in a warm corner, was wont to recite the wonderful songs of is youth, and to celebrate the mighty battles and hunting feats of the big-boned Fingalians. To these songs Peter of the Psalms gave attentive ear, and being something of a penman, carefully inscribed them in a book. One day Peter had been more than usually successful in the chase, and brought home on his shoulders the carcass of a huge stag. Of this stag a leg was dressed for supper, and when it was picked bare, Peter triumphantly inquired of Ossian, "In the Fingalian days you speak about, killed you ever a stag so large as this?" Ossian balanced the bone in his hand; then, sniffing intense disdain, replied, "This bone, big as you think it, could be dropped into the hollow of a Fingalian blackbird's leg." Peter of the Psalms, enraged at what he conceived an unconceivable crammer on the part of his father-in-law, started up, swearing that he would not ruin his soul by preserving any more of his lying songs, and flung the volume in the fire; but his wife darted forward and snatched it up, half-charred, from the embers. At this conduct on the part of Peter, Ossian groaned in spirit, and wished to die, that he might be saved from the envy and stupidities of the little people, whose minds were as stunted as their bodies. When he went to bed he implored his ancient gods for he was a sad heathen to resuscitate, if but for one hour, the hounds, the stags, and the blackbirds of his youth, that he might astonish and confound the unbelieving Peter. prayers done, he fell on slumber, and just before dawn a