D EMO'S land sits and keeps the gates of the West,
and the wind, frozen on the Arctic wave, comes blowing over the shoulder of the world. Its puny Northern villages lie huddled in morass and bog; and all of the outside world it knows is the sight of the great ships of ocean, warm with white lights, passing to the tropics. It is a land full of futile hamlets, which kindle and stir when the sound of a rare carriage-wheel has come to break a moon's monotony : slatternly wives stand in the mud at their thresholds, beside the peat-stack, and stare ; boys in canvas trousers and Naval Reserve bonnets pursue the fugitive carriage ; dogs send up a long ululation; the shepherd on the moor leans on his crook, the peat-cutter on his iron, and gaze ; the carriage is gone, but is a thing to talk of round the peat fire of nights when the wind is threatening to lift the thatched roof into the Western Ocean. William Black has described it, but it is not this land ; Celtic bards uncountable have raised " the lofty rhyme" about it; nor are such bards yet dead, but live, and their works with them. But neither novelist nor poet has struck such a true and vital note as did Hakluyt when in his account of Frobisher's second voyage be wrote :—" Their houses are very simply builded with pebble stone, without any chimneys, the fire being made in the midst thereof. The good man, wife, children, and other of the family, eat and sleep on the one side of the house, and their cattle on the other, very beastly and rudely in respect of civilisation." Hakluyt might have been writing of the conditions of to-day, and should have added that children in the winter make a breakfast of potatoes, and go to school barefoot through the snow, carrying a peat for the school fire; that women are beasts of burden, and such as have no ponies walk daily, blow high or blow low, four or five miles out to the moor, and a like distance back, for a creel of peats—on Saturday a double trip ; that men and women walk twenty miles into Stornoway and back to consult an old hag about the witches who are taking the milk of their cows.
Dune lives in Thule, in a black house,—that is, a house built of " pebble-stones " and the walls a yard in thickness; the roof-beams treasured as gold, for there are no trees in the Long Island. The history of some of these—once driftwood— has been in the family for generations. It is thatched over with the threshed barley-stalks which have been plucked, not cut, with a single eye to this, and the inner layer of thatch is stripped from the roof in summer and laid to the potatoes, because of the soot. The floor is of clay, and in the midst the fire, built of three walls of peat, the inner a core of red ; above the fire a chain; a tall man standing on a chair can touch the roof ; yet no eye bath seen where the chain is fastened to the black roof-beam, because of the impenetrable gloom of smoke and soot; no chimney; a small window perchance ; and down there the fire glinting on the eyes of the cattle, and lighting up industrious fowls which scrape and pick among the manure. Such is Dune's house ; such are a hundred-and-one other houses there.
Dune long ago was a constable. Not a uniformed official of the Queen, but a servant of the proprietor of the island. Each township had two or three. They saw that at the sowing of seed the cattle were taken to the moor; that the high roads running through the crofts were barred to prevent the intrusion appointed pasturage on the " machar " (Anglia, " field"); that all the sheep were shepherded by chosen men; in short, they managed the affairs of the various townships, settled disputes, fixed landmarks, for all of which they received five shillings a year and a rod of office. This rod Dune still possesses; dften he had used it to gauge milk, with a view to ascertaining the amount of loss due to witches. But the Land League and Crofter Commissions abolished the office, and to-day Dune is a shepherd, the best in the Long Island, and lives in the main in his master's bothy. It is no idle boast to say he is the best shepherd in the Long Island, for there is not a sheep but he knows, not an ear-mark. Dune can ascertain the family of any chance stranger by asking him his father'q ear-mark. To me he is a passing old man, a wonderful chew* of tobacco, good at folk-lore, and a teller of old tales, scarred like himself. The first time I met him was in the dark, and I knew nothing save that it was the voice of an old man, and the voice was quick and tremulous; and it said, part in broken English, the major part in Gaelic : " If the world be going round, how we no come to the warm countries F" I laughed and tried to explain ; but, ah ! Dunc, had I known then what I know now of the tragic seriousness of that question, there had been little room for mirth.
On the morrow at the fink I saw Dune at the clipping, and his wrinkled face looked out through a gap in his hair, which was the colour of the wool of his sheep. He was barefooted, and wore stockings without soles ; his knickers were wholly of patches, and a cloud of hair was setting at defiance an old tam-o'-shanter. Plainly, too, he had shaved but not washed, for the dried soap was on his chin. He asked me to look at his foot, which was.festering, and the sore running. I entered into conversation, and this is his story. When the crofters went to Edinburgh on their trial for their share in the crofter riots, Dune went to bear testimony against them. They threatened his life, and these threats he took so much to heart, that on a day it befell that he went down Princes Street waving his crook, shouting on,his collie, calling in Gaelic to his sheep. "And they put ire in the asylum," he went on in his curious English—I must translate for the reader—" and washed me, and nothing wrong with me ; one doctor caught me by the wrist, feeli/T, me, and another by the fingers, and they told me I %ZS in my mind, but that they would keep me for a month ; aua I came out clean and fat; I was never so fat before." So sleek and shining, indeed, that he took a wife, who, bearing him daughters and a son, died. He sought out a second wife, and in time buried her beside the first ; but between the graves is a space of a man's breadth, and them Dunc shall lie. Yet a third wife he sought, but the woman refused his offer, and again Dune went mad. He was taken to Inverness, and for a space was again fed and washed. His voice rose and fell in the midst of the bleating of the lambs at the clipping on the hillside, and once his eyes looked down upon the graves at the sea. The long tangled grass there is the headstone, or a silly piece of driftwood, and rabbits and the sheep scrape the sand, and human bones lie exposed. His wives are there, and those who swore against him in Court, and drove his reason from its seat, for Dune is very old, and the last of a race that know not the motor-car. One day on the moor, after drinking his dram, which he prefaced by the Lord's Prayer, he said : "I'll sing a song made by the first man that went to America—his name was MacGreegor." The verses were numerous, and Dune had never heard of Columbus ; but he chanted the Gaelic with burning eyes. Mowed a song of the expected assumption of regal power in Stornoway by Prince Charlie, and his woe when on a night of rain, at the breaking of tempest, he, hunted, an alien where he bad. looked for welcome and the strength of horses, went forth on the moor to sleep. "And to-day." said Dune, "they will be making a cairn where he slept; aoh!" The exclama- tion was eloquent of contempt. He put me to bitter shame by asking me where in the Book was the sun a cinder, who was Job's grandfather, and the like. Dune gave the book, chapter, and verse on every occasion. There have been, I believe, similar cases of extraordinary power of memory with men who have been mad. His sons and daughters are scattered over the world; their letters are read to him. And "here is one son who never writes, and I wish I knew his history, to tell Dune. When the rain swept the croft-lands, blinding the sea, and the bothy pane was dim, his son left him to go to New Zealand. Because of the clouded pane and his weak eyes, Dune went out to the threshold in the rain, and saw his boy go over a bend of the brae—out of his Me. And he turned to rekindle the fire against the coming of his daughter from school, for the rain had put it out. Ah! Dune, "'tis true, 'Cs pity, and pity 'tie, 'tis true," that the world in her spinning cannot turn you to the warm lands of New Zealand. Often on the moor he sits alone communing with the old dead, and the memories of ancient things fall upon him,— those things of the night when, as the breathing of the spirit, the unseen sweeps on the face of the hills. Below us, like exiles in a far country, lay the ruins of crofters' cots, and full of that memory of things past, Dunc spoke of the time when these hearths sent up the smoke of a village. Far "from the lone shealing on the misty island" Dune's thin voice rose in the poignancy of the threnody, and the blue eyes filled, as he crooned Gaelic laments for
"Old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago."
Living in simplicity, and knowing neither hunger nor luxury, the people were taken and cast into a ship. Down in the dark hold fever raged. The ruins still stand, but the women, the knitters in the sun who sang world-old runes at the waulking, are gone with the children who tended the cattle when these went down to the little rivers to drink, or in the twilight came lowing home from the hill. It was good, said Dune, that the old folk went to their rest in the place of graves, being too far stricken in years to try new lands, and knew not of a ship which upon the high seas was lightened of its cargo of fever-stricken corpses, and shall not know till there shall be no more sea. A ifhip pierced with lights and with a clang of the bell, for it was the time of starboard watch, went by the little isles huddled in the rain; the mariners singing sea-songs in the watches ; an officer whistling at the wheel; and she was away over the bend of the world. The moon came out, revealing Scotland like a long lean ship of war. Away back on lost moors where lonely and strange shepherds dwell, were Dune and I; from our eyrie and hill of solitude we stood at our shealing door and saw the ships of ocean go by to the tropics, but I did not tell Dune that these ships went to New Zealand And when the pens are no longer bleating, and the hillside is quiet, and the scrabbling mists twist up the burns, I think of him, not propounding questions from the Book, and bursting into glee as he reels off chapter and verse ; not chanting Gaelic poetry as an old pagan of Greece would Homer, with eyes aflame in his tender womanish face; not running with the lunch-basket before the girls, and leaping in glee ; but I think of him on the day when he stood with me long ago on the lone hillside, his grey tartan plaid on his shoulder, his feet naked, and, leaning on his crook, told me with an unheard but felt sob, of how he turned to his cold hearthstone when his son went over the hill in the rain—out of his life. And then in the dark I hear an old man's pleading voice asking why the world does not turn round to the warm countries. J. M. H.
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