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My Old Library and its Contents--The Three Classes of Traditions--Legend of Sludach--Singular Test of Character--The Writer's Pledge, 1

Alypos--Etymological Legends--Epic Poetry of the Middle Ages--Astorimon--The Spectre Ships--Olaus Rudbeck, 10

The Bay of Cromarty--The Old Coast Line--The Old Town--The Storms of the Five Winters--Donald Miller's Wars with the Sea, 25

Macbeth--Our earlier Data--The Fions of Knock-Ferril--The King's Sons--The Obelisks of Easter Ross--Dunskaith--The Urquharts of Cromarty--Wallace--The Foray of the Clans--Paterhemon, 36

Remains of the Old Mythology--The Devotional Sentiment--Interesting Usages--Rites of the Scottish Halloween--The Charm of the Egg--The Twelfth Rig--Macculloch's Courtship--The Extinct Spectres--Legend of Morial's Den--The Guardian Cock, 55

A Scottish Town of the 17th Century--The Old Castle of the Urquharts--Hereditary Sheriffship, 75

Sir Thomas Urquhart, 86

The Reformation--Outbreaking at Rosemarkie--Sir John Urquhart of Craigfintrie--The Ousted Ministers--Mr. Fraser of Brea--Luggie, 105

The Chaplain's Lair, 124

The Curates--Donald Roy of Nigg--The Breaking of the Burgh--George Earl of Cromartie--The Union, 143

Important Events which affect the Religious Character--Kenneth Ore--Thomas Hogg and the Man-horse--The Watchman of Cullicuden--The Lady of Ardvrock--The Lady of Balconie, 157

The Fisherman's Widow, 177

The Story of John Feddes--Andrew Lindsay, 194

The Chapel of St. Regulus--Macleod the Smuggler--The Story of Sandy Wood, 209

The Poor Lost Lad--A Ballad in Prose--Morrison the Painter, 221

The Economy of Accident--The Black Years--Progress of the Pestilence--The Quarantine--The Cholera, 235

Martinmas Market--The Herring Drove--The Whale-Fishers--The Flight of the Drove--Urquhart of Greenhill--Poem--William Forsyth--The Caithness Man's Leap, 250

Sandy Wright and the Puir Orphan, 267

Tarbat Ness--Stine Bheag o' Tarbat, 279

The Mermaid--The Story of John Reid--Maculloch the Corn-Agent--The Washing of the Mermaid, 290

The Bad Year--Sandison's Spulzie--The Meal Mob, 305

The Forty-Five--Nanny Miller's Onslaught--The Retreat--The Battle of Culloden--Old John Dunbar--Jacobite Psalm, 319

The Dropping Cave--The Legend of Willie Millar--A Boy Adventurer--Fiddler's Well, 329

Wars of the Town's-people--Maculloch the Lawyer--The Law-Plea--Roderick and the Captain--Mr. Henderson, 342

The Churchyard Ghost--My Writing Room--The Broken Promise--The Polander--The One-eyed Stepmother--The Pedlar--The Green Lady--Munro the Post, 357

The Literati of Cromarty--Johnie o' the Shore--Meggie o' the Shore--David Henderson--Macculloch of Dun-Loth, 377

The Gudewife of Minitarf, 395

The Old School, and what it produced--Dr. Hossack--The hard Dominie--Mr. Russel the minister--The Cock-Fight--Maculloch the Mechanician, 408

The Itinerant Sculptor--Kirk-Michael--The Apprentice's Dream--The Wild Wife--Gordon of Newhall--Sir Robert Munro--Babble Hanah, 432

George Ross, the Scotch Agent, 449

The Burn of Eathie--Donald Calder--The Story of Tom M'Kechan--Fause Jamie, 461

Our Town Politics--The First Whig--The Revolution--The Democracy--The Procession--Hossack's Pledge--The County Meeting--The French War--Whiggism of the People, 473

SCENES AND LEGENDS.

THE TRADITIONAL HISTORY OF CROMARTY.

"Tradition is a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be rekindled."--JOHNSON.

Extremes may meet in the intellectual as certainly as in the moral world. I find, in tracing to its first beginnings the slowly accumulated magazine of facts and inferences which forms the stock in trade on which my mind carries on its work of speculation and exchange, that my greatest benefactors have been the philosophic Bacon and an ignorant old woman, who, of all the books ever written, was acquainted with only the Bible.

It has often been a subject of regret to me, that this oral knowledge of the past, which I deem so interesting, should be thus suffered to be lost. The meteor, says my motto, if it once fall, cannot be rekindled. Perhaps had I been as conversant, some five or ten years ago, with the art of the writer as with the narratives of my early monitors, no one at this time of day would have to entertain a similar feeling; but I was not so conversant with it, nor am I yet, and the occasion still remains. The Sibyline tomes of tradition are disappearing in this part of the country one by one; and I find, like Selkirk in his island when the rich fruits of autumn were dropping around him, that if I myself do not preserve them they must perish. I therefore set myself to the task of storing them up as I best may, and urge as my only apology the emergency of the case. Not merely do I regard them as the produce of centuries, and like the blossoms of the Aloe, interesting on this account alone, but also as a species of produce which the harvests of future centuries may fail to supply. True it is, that superstition is a weed indigenous to the human mind, and will spring up in the half-cultivated corners of society in every coming generation; but then the superstitions of the future may have little in common with those of the past. True it is, that human nature is intrinsically the same in all ages and all countries; but then it is not so with its ever-varying garb of custom and opinion, and never again may it wear this garb in the curious obsolete fashion of a century ago.--Geologists tell us that the earth produced its plants and animals at a time when the very stones of our oldest ruins existed only as mud or sand; but they were certainly not the plants and animals of Linnaeus or Buffon.

The traditions of the second class, being in most instances only imperfect copies of extravagant and ill-conceived originals, are much less interesting than those of the first; and such of them as are formed on the commoner models, or have already, in some shape or other, been laid before the public, I shall take the liberty of rejecting. A very few of them, however, are of a superior and more local cast, and these I shall preserve. Their merit, such as it is, consists principally in their structure as stories--a merit, I am disposed to think, which, when even at the best, is of no high order. I have observed that there is more of plot and counter-plot in our commonest novels and lowest kind of plays, than in the tales and dramas of our best writers; and what can be more simple than the fables of the Iliad and the Paradise Lost!--From the third class of traditions I trust to derive some of my choicest materials. Like those of the first, they are rich in character and incident, and to what is natural in them and based on fact, there is added, as in Epic poetry, a kind of machinery, supplied either by invention or superstition, or borrowed from the fictions of the bards, or from the old classics. In one or two instances I have met with little strokes of fiction in them, of a similar character with, some of even the finest strokes in the latter, but which seem to be rather coincidences of invention, if I may so express myself, than imitations.--There occurs to me a story of this class which may serve to illustrate my meaning.

In the upper part of the parish of Cromarty there is a singularly curious spring, termed Sludach, which suddenly dries up every year early in summer, and breaks out again at the close of autumn. It gushes from the bank with an undiminished volume until within a few hours before it ceases to flow for the season, and bursts forth on its return in a full stream. And it acquired this peculiar character, says tradition, some time in the seventeenth century. On a very warm day of summer, two farmers employed in the adjacent fields were approaching the spring in opposite directions to quench their thirst. One of them was tacksman of the farm on which the spring rises, the other tenanted a neighbouring farm. They had lived for some time previous on no very friendly terms. The tacksman, a coarse, rude man, reached the spring first, and taking a hasty draught, he gathered up a handful of mud, and just as his neighbour came up, flung it into the water. "Now," said he, turning away as he spoke, "you may drink your fill." Scarcely had he uttered the words, however, when the offended stream began to boil like a caldron, and after bubbling a while among the grass and rushes, sunk into the ground. Next day at noon the heap of grey sand which had been incessantly rising and falling within it, in a little conical jet, for years before, had become as dry as the dust of the fields; and the strip of white flowering cresses which skirted either side of the runnel that had issued from it, lay withering in the sun. What rendered the matter still more extraordinary, it was found that a powerful spring had burst out on the opposite side of the firth, which at this place is nearly five miles in breadth, a few hours after the Cromarty one had disappeared. The story spread; the tacksman, rude and coarse as he was, was made unhappy by the forebodings of his neighbours, who seemed to regard him as one resting under a curse; and going to an elderly person in an adjoining parish, much celebrated for his knowledge of the supernatural, he craved his advice. "Repair," said the seer, "to the old hollow of the fountain, and as nearly as you can guess, at the hour in which you insulted the water, and after clearing it out with a clean linen towel lay yourself down beside it and abide the result." He did so, and waited on the bank above the hollow from noon until near sunset, when the water came rushing up with a noise like the roar of the sea, scattering the sand for several yards around; and then, subsiding to its common level, it flowed on as formerly between the double row of cresses. The spring on the opposite side of the firth withdrew its waters about the time of the rite of the cleansing, and they have not since re-appeared; while those of Sludach, from that day to the present, are presented, as if in scorn, during the moister seasons, when no one regards them as valuable, and withheld in the seasons of drought, when they would be prized. We recognise in this singular tradition a kind of soul or Naiad of the spring, susceptible of offence, and conscious of the attentions paid to it; and the passage of the waters beneath the sea reminds us of the river Alpheus sinking at Peloponnesus to rise in Sicily.

Next in degree to the pleasure I have enjoyed in collecting these traditions, is the satisfaction which I have felt in contemplating the various cabinets, if I may so speak, in which I found them stored up according to their classes. For I soon discovered that the different sorts of stories were not lodged indiscriminately in every sort of mind--the people who cherished the narratives of one particular class frequently rejecting those of another. I found, for instance, that the traditions of the third class, with all their machinery of wraiths and witches, were most congenial to the female mind; and I think I can now perceive that this was quite in character. Women, taken in the collective, are more poetical, more timid, more credulous than men. If we but add to these general traits one or two that are less so, and a few very common circumstances; if we but add a judgment not naturally vigorous, an imagination more than commonly active, an ignorance of books and of the world, a long-cherished belief in the supernatural, a melancholy old age, and a solitary fireside--we have compounded the elements of that terrible poetry which revels among skulls, and coffins, and enchantments, as certainly as Nature did when she moulded the brain of a Shakspere. The stories of the second class I have almost never found in communion with those of the third; and never heard well told--except as jokes. To tell a story avowedly untrue, and to tell it as a piece of humour, requires a very different cast of mind from that which characterized the melancholy people who were the grand depositories of the darker traditions: they entertained these only because they deemed them mysterious and very awful truths, while they regarded open fictions as worse than foolish. Nor were their own stories better received by a third sort of persons, from whom I have drawn some of my best traditions of the first class, and who were mostly shrewd, sagacious men, who, having acquired such a tinge of scepticism as made them ashamed of the beliefs of their weaker neighbours, were yet not so deeply imbued with it as to deem these beliefs mere matters of amusement. They did battle with them both in themselves and the people around them, and found the contest too serious an affair to be laughed at. Now, however , the successors of this order of people venture readily enough on telling a good ghost story, when they but get one to tell. Superstition, so long as it was living superstition, they deemed, like the live tiger in his native woods, a formidable, mischievous thing, fit only to be destroyed; but now that it has perished, they possess themselves of its skin and its claws, and store them up in their cabinets.

I have thus given a general character of the contents of my departed library, and the materials of my proposed work. My stories form a kind of history of the district of country to which they belong--hence the title I have chosen for them; and, to fill up some of those interstices which must always be occurring in a piece of history purely traditional, I shall avail myself of all the little auxiliary facts with which books may supply me. The reader, however, need be under no apprehension of meeting much he was previously acquainted with; and, should I succeed in accomplishing what I have purposed, the local aspect of my work may not militate against its interest. Human nature is not exclusively displayed in the histories of only great countries, or in the actions of only celebrated men; and human nature may be suffered to assert its claim on the attention of the beings who partake of it, even though the specimens exhibited be furnished by the traditions of an obscure village. Much, however, depends on the manner in which a story is told; and thus far I may vouch for the writer. I have seriously resolved not to be tedious, unless I cannot help it; and so, if I do not prove amusing, it will be only because I am unfortunate enough to be dull. I shall have the merit of doing my best--and what writer ever did more? I pray the reader, however, not to form any very harsh opinion of me for at least the first four chapters, and to be not more than moderately critical on the two or three that follow. There is an obscurity which hangs over the beginnings of all history--a kind of impalpable fog--which the writer can hardly avoid transferring from the first openings of his subject to the first pages of his book. He sees through this haze the men of an early period "like trees walking;" and, even should he believe them to be beings of the same race with himself, and of nearly the same shape and size--a belief not always entertained--it is impossible for him, from the atmosphere which surrounds them, to catch those finer traits of form and feature by which he could best identify them with the species. And hence a necessary lack of interest.

"Consider it warilie; read aftiner than anis."--GAVIN DOUGLAS.

The histories of single districts of country rarely ascend into so remote an antiquity as to be lost like those of nations in the ages of fable. It so happens, however, whether fortunately or otherwise, for the writer, that in this respect the old shire of Cromarty differs from every other in the kingdom. Sir Thomas Urquhart, an ingenious native of the district, who flourished about the middle of the seventeenth century, has done for it all that the chroniclers and senachies of England and Ireland have done for their respective countries; and as he united to a vigorous imagination a knowledge of what is excellent in character, instead of peopling it with the caco-demons of the one kingdom, or the resuscitated antediluvians of the other, he has bestowed upon it a longer line of heroes and demigods than can be exhibited by the annals of either. I avail myself of his writings on the strength of that argument which O'Flaherty uses in his Ogygia as an apology for the story of the three fishermen who were driven by tempest into a haven of Ireland fifteen days before the universal deluge. "Where there is no room," says this historian, "for just disquisition, and no proper field of inquiry, we must rely on the common suffrages of the writers of our country; to whose opinions I voluntarily subscribe."

I have seen in the museum of the Northern Institution a very complete collection of stone battle-axes, some of which were formed little earlier than the last age by the rude natives of America and the South Sea Islands; while others, which had been dug out of the cairns and tumuli of our own country, witnessed to the unrecorded feuds and forgotten battle-fields of twenty centuries ago. I was a good deal struck by the resemblance which they bore to each other--a resemblance so complete, that the most practised eye could hardly distinguish between the weapons of the old Scot and those of the New Zealander. Both seemed to have selected the same rude materials, employed the same imperfect implements, and wrought after the same uncouth model. But man in a savage state is the same animal everywhere, and his constructive powers, whether employed in the formation of a legendary story or of a battle-axe, seem to expatiate almost everywhere in the same rugged track of invention. For even the traditions of this first stage may be identified, like its weapons of war, all the world over. Mariner, in his account of the Tonga Islands, tells us that the natives pointed out to him a perforated rock, in the hollow of which, they said, one of their gods, when employed in fishing, entangled his hook, and that, pulling lustily to disengage it, he pulled up the whole island from the bottom of the sea. Do not this singular story, and the wild legend of Ben-Vaichard, though the product of ages and countries so widely separated, belong obviously to the same rude stage of invention?

There may be some little interest in tracing the footprints of what I may term the more savage traditions of a country in the earlier pages of its history, and in marking how they blend with its imperfect narratives of real but ill-remembered events, on the one hand, and its mutilated imitations of the masterpieces of a classical literature, on the other. The fabulous pages of English history furnish, when regarded in this point of view, a not uninteresting field to the legendary critic. They are suited to remind him of those huts of the wild Arab, composed of the fragments of ruined grandeur which the traveller finds amid the ruins of Palmyra or Balbec, and in which, as he prosecutes his researches, he sees the capital totter over the architrave, the base overtop the capital, masses of turf heaped round the delicate volute, which emulated in granite the curled tresses of a beautiful female, and the marble foliage of the acanthus crushed by the rude joist which bends under a roof of clay and rushes. Perhaps the reader may indulge me in a few brief remarks on this rather curious subject.

Diocletian, the Syrian king of the English legend, is, as Buchanan justly remarks, a second Danaus, and owes his existence to the story of his prototype; but the story of the marriages of his daughters with an order of demons, which, according to that historian, the English have invented through a pride of emulating the Gauls and Germans, who derive their lineage from Pluto, does not appear to me to be so legitimately traced to its original. The oldest of all the traditions of Britain seem to be those which describe it as peopled at some remote era by giants;--they are the broken vestiges, it is possible, of those incidents of Mosaic history which are supposed to be shadowed out in the fables of the giants of Grecian mythology, or they are perhaps mutilated remains of the fables themselves. It seems more probable, however, that they should have originated in that belief, common to the vulgar of all countries, that the race of men is degenerating in size and prowess with every succeeding generation, and that at some early period their bulk and strength must have been gigantic. Judging of them from their appearance, they must have been known in a very early age--an age as early perhaps as that of the stone battle-axe; and what more probable than that they should have attracted the notice of the chroniclers, who would naturally consult tradition for the materials of their first pages? But tradition, though it records the achievements of the giants, is silent respecting their origin. A first link would therefore be wanting, which could only be supplied by imagination; and as, like every other class of writers, the chroniclers would find it easier to imitate than to invent, it is not difficult to conceive how, after having learned in their cloisters that in an early age of the world the sons of God had contracted marriages with the daughters of men, and that heroes and giants were the fruit of the connexion--they should blend a legend imitative of the event with the stories of the giants of Britain. Their next employment, for it would be too bold an attempt to link so terrible a tribe to the people of their own times, would be to show how this tribe became extinct, and the manner in which the country was first peopled with men like themselves.

There is but one way in which anything probable can be acquired concerning the origin of a people who have no early history; but the process is both difficult and laborious. There is another sufficiently easy, which barely reaches the possible, and which the historians of eight hundred years ago would have deemed the more eligible of the two. Instead of setting themselves to ascertain those circumstances by which the several families of men are distinguished, or to compare the language, character, and superstitions of the people of their own country with those of the various tribes of the Continent, they would apply for such assistance as the imitator derives from his copy, to the histories of other kingdoms. From their connexion with the Latin Church they would be conversant with Roman literature, and acquainted with the story of AEneas as related by the historians, and amplified and adorned by Virgil. And thus, what may be termed the third link of their history, has come to bear a discernible resemblance to the early history of Rome. The occasion of the wanderings of Brutus resembles that of the expatriation of Tydeus, or rather that of the madness of OEdipus, but he is the AEneas of England notwithstanding. His history is a kind of national epic. Cornaeus is his Achates. He finds hostile Rutulians, headed by a Turnus, in the giants and their leader; and Britain is both his Italy and his Trinacria, though, instead of fleeing from the Cyclops, he conquers them.

The legend of Scotland may also be regarded as a national epic. It is formed on the same model with the story of Brutus, but it has the merit of being a somewhat more skilful imitation, and there is nothing outrageously improbable in any of its circumstances. Galethus, its hero, is the AEneas of Scotland. He was the son of Cecrops, the founder of Athens, and, like Romulus, made himself famous as a captain of robbers before he became the founder of a nation. Having repeatedly invaded Macedonia and the neighbouring provinces of Greece, he was in imminent danger of being overpowered by a confederacy of the states he had injured, when, assembling his friends and followers, he retreated into Egypt, at a time when that kingdom was ravaged from its southern boundary to the gates of Memphis by an army of Ethiopians. Assuming on the sudden a new character, he joined his forces to those of Pharaoh, gave battle to the invaders, routed them with much slaughter, pursued them into Ethiopia, and after a succession of brilliant victories over them, compelled them to sue for peace. On his return he was presented by the king with the hand of his daughter Scota, and made general in chief of all the forces of the kingdom. Disgusted, however, by the cruelties practised on the Israelites, and warned by Moses and an oracle of the judgments by which these cruelties were to be punished, he fitted out a fleet, and, accompanied by great numbers of Greeks and Egyptians, set sail from the river Nile with the intention of forming a settlement on the shores of the Mediterranean. After a tedious voyage he arrived at a port of Numidia, where no better success awaited him than was met with by AEneas in the scene of his first colony. Again putting to sea, he passed the Pillars of Hercules, and after having experienced in the navigation of the straits dangers similar to those which appalled Ulysses when passing through the Straits of Messina, he landed in that part of Spain which has ever since been known by the name of Portugal. He found in this country a second Tiber in the river Munda, and a fierce army of Rutulians in the inhabitants. But his good fortune did not desert him. He vanquished his enemies in one decisive battle, dispossessed them of their fairest provinces, built cities, instituted laws, conquered and colonized Ireland, and, dying after a long and prosperous reign, left his kingdom to his children. Prior to his decease, his subjects, both Greeks and Egyptians, were termed Scots, from their having sunk their original designations in that name, out of courtesy to their Queen Scota--a name afterwards transferred to Albyn by a colony from Ireland, who took possession of it a few ages subsequent to the age of Galethus. Such is the fable of what may be regarded both as the historic epic of Scotland, and as the most classical of all the imitations of the AEneid which were fabricated during the middle ages.

Sir Thomas has recorded nothing further of his ancestor Alypos, than that he followed up his discovery of Cromarty by planting it with a colony of his countrymen, who, though some of his ancestors had settled in Portugal several ages before, seem to have been Greeks. Of sixteen of his immediate descendants, it is only known that they were born, and that they married--some of them finding honourable consorts in Ireland, some in Greece, and one in Italy. The wife of that one was a sister of Marcus Coriolanus--a daughter of Agesilaus the Spartan, a daughter of Simeon Breck, the first crowned king of the Irish Scots, a daughter of Alcibiades, the friend and pupil of Socrates, and a niece of Lycurgus the lawgiver, were wives to some of the others. Never was there a family that owed more to its marriages.

About fifteen years ago, a Cromarty fisherman was returning from Inverness by a road which for several miles skirts the upper edge of the moor, and passes within a few yards of the cairn. Night overtook him ere he had half completed his journey; but, after an interval of darkness, the moon, nearly at full, rose over the eminence on his right, and restored to him the face of the country--the hills which he had passed before evening, but which, faint and distant, were sinking as he advanced, the wood which, bordering his road on the one hand, almost reached him with its shadow, and the bleak, unvaried, interminable waste, which, stretching away on the other, seemed lost in the horizon. After he had entered on the moor, the stillness which, at an earlier stage of his journey, had occasionally been broken by the distant lowing of cattle, or the bark of a shepherd's dog, was interrupted by only his own footsteps, which, from the nature of the soil, sounded hollow as if he trod over a range of vaults, and by the low monotonous murmur of the neighbouring wood. As he approached the cairn, however, a noise of a different kind began to mingle with the other two; it was one with which his profession had made him well acquainted--that of waves breaking against a rock. The nearest shore was fully three miles distant, the nearest cliff more than five, and yet he could hear wave after wave striking as if against a precipice, then dashing upwards, and anon descending, as distinctly as he had ever done when passing in his boat beneath the promontories of Cromarty. On coming up to the cairn, his astonishment was converted into terror.--Instead of the brown heath, with here and there a fir seedling springing out of it he saw a wide tempestuous sea stretching before him, with the large pile of stones frowning over it, like one of the Hebrides during the gales of the Equinox. The pile appeared as if half enveloped in cloud and spray, and two large vessels, with all their sheets spread to the wind, were sailing round it.

The writer of these chapters had the good fortune to witness at this cairn a scene which, without owing anything to the supernatural, almost equalled the one described. He was, like the fisherman, returning from Inverness to Cromarty in a clear frosty night in December. There was no moon, but the whole sky towards the north was glowing with the Aurora Borealis, which, shooting from the horizon to the central heavens, in flames tinged with all the hues of the rainbow, threw so strong a light, that he could have counted every tree of the wood, and every tumulus of the moor. There is a long hollow morass which runs parallel to the road for nearly a mile;--it was covered this evening by a dense fleece of vapour raised by the frost, and which, without ascending, was rolling over the moor before a light breeze. It had reached the cairn, and the detached clump of seedlings which springs up at its base.--The seedlings rising out of the vapour appeared like a fleet of ships, with their sails dropping against their masts, on a sea where there were neither tides nor winds;--the cairn, grey with the moss and lichens of forgotten ages, towered over it like an island of that sea.

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