THE Laird of Canna might fitly be styled its King

; for over that lonely domain he exercises quite regal authority, and he is luckier in one respect than most monarchs—he keeps all the cash. His subjects number four score—men, women, children. Some till his land, some herd his sheep. For him the long-line fishers row along the stormy coasts of Rum, for him the wild boors batter out the brains of seals on the neighbouring rocks of Haskeir ; the flocks on the crags are his, and the two smacks in the bay ; every roof and tenement for man or beast pays him rent of some sort. The solid modern building, surrounded by the civilized brick wall, is his palace—a recent erection, strangely out of keeping with the rude cabins and heather houses in the vicinity. Yet the laird of Canna is not proud. He toiled hard with his hands long before the stroke of good fortune which made him the heritor of the isle, and even now be communes freely with the lowliest subject, and (see yonder !) is not above boarding the trader in the bay in his shirt-sleeves. A shrewd, active, broad-shouldered man is the laird, still young, and as active as a goat. Though he sits late at night among his books, he is up with the greyest dawn to look after his fields. You meet him everywhere over the island, mounted royally on his sturdy little sheltie, and gazing around him with a face which says plainly,—

" I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute."

But at times he sails far away southward in his own boats, speculating with the shrewdest, and surely keeping his own. In the midst of his happy sway he has a fine smile and a kindly heart for the stranger, as we can testify. The great can afford to be generous, though, of course, if greatness were to be measured by mere amount of income, the laird, though a " warm " man, would have to be ranked among the lowly. He has in abundance what all the Stuarts tried in vain to feel—the perfect sense of solitary sway.

Think of it,—dreamer, power-hunter, piner after the Napoleonic ! A fertile island, a simple people, ships and flocks all your own, and all set solitary and inviolate in the great sea : for how much less have throats been cut, hearths desolated, even nations ruined? There is no show, no bunkum, no flash jewellery of power, but veritable power itself. In old days, there would have been the gleaming of tartans, the flashing of swords, the sound of wassail, the intoning of the skald ; but now, instead, we have the genuine modern article—a monarch of a speculative turn, transacting business in his shirt-sleeves. The realm flourishes too. Each cotter or shepherd pays his rent in labour, and is prmitted a plot of ground to grow potatoes and graze a cow. The fishermen are supported in the same way. Both sexes toil out of doors at the crops and take part in the shearing, but the women have plenty of time to watch the cow and weave homespun on their rude looms. All on the isle, excepting only the laird himself, belong to the old Romish faith, even the laird's own wife and children being Catholics. There is no bickering, civil or religious. The supreme head of the state is universally popular, and praised for his thoughtfulness and generosity—a single exAmple of which is as good as a hundred. It is the custom of many Highland proprie- tors, notably those of Islay, to levy a rent on those who burn the seaweeds and tangles on their shore, charging the poor makers about a pound on every ton of kelp so produced. Not so the Laird of Canna. "He charges nothing," said our informant, a wild old Irish wanderer, whom we found kelp-burning close to our anchorage ; "the Laird is too decent a man to take rint for the rocks 1"

One might wander far, like those princes of Eastern fable who went that weary quest in search of kingdoms, and fare far worse than here. Though environed on every side by rocks and crags, and ringed by the watery waste, Canna is fat and fertile, full of excellent sheep pastures and patches of fine arable ground. Its lower slopes in times remote were enriched by the salt seadoatn, and its highest peaks have been dunged for ages by innumerable sea- fowl. Huge sheep of the Cheviot breed cover all the slopes, find- ing their way to the most inaccessible crags ; long trains of milch cows wind from the hills to the outside of the laird's dairy morning and gloaming ; and in the low rich under-stretches of valley are little patches of excellent corn, where the loud " creek-creek " of the corncraik sounds harsh and loud. So much for the material blessings of the island. Then as to those other blessings which touch the eye and soul.

It is a fish-shaped island about five miles long and a mile and a half broad, throwing out by a small isthmus on the western side a low peninsula of grassy green. In the space between the penin- sula and the south-eastern point of the mainland lies the har- bour, and across the isthmus to the west lies another greater bay, so sown with grim little islands and sunken rocks as to be totally useless to navigators in any weal her. The peninsula is somewhat low, but the crags of the main island tower to an immense height above the level of the sea.

Canna is the child of the great waters, and such children, lonely and terrible as is their portion, seldom lack loveliness—often their only dower. From the edge of the lipping water to the peak of the highest crag, it is clothed on with ocean gifts and signs of power. Its strange under-caves and rocks are coloured with rainbow hues, drawn from glorious-featured weeds ; overhead, its cliffs of basalt rise shadowy, ledge after ledge darkened by innumerable little wings ; and high over all, grow soft greenswards, knolls of thyme and heather, where sheep bleat and whence the herd-boy crawls over to look into the raven's neat. On a still summer day, when the long Atlantic swell is crystal smooth, Canna looks supremely gentle on her image in the tide, and out of her hollow under- caves comes the low weird whisper of a voice ; the sunlight glimmers on peaks and sea, the beautiful shadow quivers below, broken here and there by drifting weeds, and the bleating sheep on the high swards soften the stillness. But when the winds come in over the deep, the beauty changes—it darkens, it flashes from softness into power. The huge waters boil at the foot of the crags, and the peaks are caught in mist ; and the air, full of a great roar, gathers around Canna's troubled face. Climb the crags, and the horrid rocks to westward, jutting out here and there like sharks' teeth, spit the lurid white foam back in the glis- tening eyes of the sea. Slip down to the water's edge, and amid the deafening roar the spray rises far above you in a hissing shower. The whole island seems quivering through and through. The waters gather on all sides, with only one still long gleam to leeward. No place in the world could seem fuller of supernatural voices, more powerful, or more utterly alone.

It is our fortune to see the island in all its moods ; for we are in no haste to depart. Days of deep calm alternate with days of the wildest storm—there is constant change.

When there is little or no sea, it is delightful to pull in the punt round the precipitous shores, and come upon the lonely haunts of the ocean birds. There is one great cliff, with a huge rock rising out of the waters before it, which is the favourite breeding haunt of the puffins, and while swarms of these little creatures, with their bright parrot-like bills and plump white breasts, flit thick as locusts in the air, legions darken the waters underneath, and rows on rows sit brooding over their young on the dizziest edges of the cliff itself. The noise of wings is ceaseless, there is constant coming and going, and so tame are the birds that one might almost seize them, either on the water or in the air, with the out- stretched hand. Discharge a gun into the air, and as the hollow echoes roar upward and inward to the very hearts of the caves, it will suddenly seem as if the tremen- dous crags were loosening to fall,—but the dull dangerous sound you hear is only the rush of wings. A rock further north- ward is possessed entirely by gulls, chiefly the smaller species ; thousands sit still and fearless, whitening the summit like snow, but many hover with discordant scream over the passing boat, and seem trying with the wild beat of their wings to scare the intruders away. Close in shore, at the mouth of a deep dark cave, cormo- rants are to be found, great black "scuts," their mates, aud the young, preening their glistening plumage leisurely, or stretching out their snake-like necks to peer with fishy eyes this way and that. They are not very tame here, and should you present a gun, will soon flounder into the sea and disappear ; but at times, when they have gorged themselves with fish, so awkward are they with their wings, and so muddled are their wits, that one might run right abreast with them and knock them over with an oar.

Everywhere below, above, on all sides, there is nothing but life —birds innumerable, brooding over their eggs or fishing for the young. Here and there, a little fluff of down just launched out into the great world paddles about bewildered, and dives away from the boat's bow with a little troubled cry ; on the outer rocks gulls and guillemots innumerable, puffins on the crags, and cormorants on the ledges of the caves. The poor reflective human being, brought into the sound of such a life, gets quite scared and dazed. The air, the rocks, the waters are all astir. The face turns for relief upward, where the blue sky meets the summit of the crags. Even yonder, on the very ledge, a black speck sits and croaks ; and still further upward, dwarfed by distance to the size of a sparrowhawk, hovers a black eagle, fronting the sun.

There is something awe-inspiring, on a dead calm day, in the low hushed wash of the great swell that for ever sets in from the ocean ; slow, slow, it comes, with the regular beat of a pulse, rising its height, without breaking, against the cliff it mirrors in its polished breast, and then dying down beneath with a murmuring moan. What power is there ! what dreadful, fatal ebbing and flowing ! No finger can stop that under-swell, no breath can come between that and its course ; it has rolled since Time began, the same, neither more nor less, whether the weather be still or wild, and it will keep on when we are all dead. Bald that is hypochon- dria. But look ! what is that floating yonder, on the glassy water ?

"Is it a piece o' weed or floating hair, 0' drowned maiden's hair ?''

No; but it tells as clear a tale. Those planks formed lately the sides of a ship, and on that old mattress, with the straw washing out of the rents, some weary sailor pillowed his head not many hours ago. Where is the ship now ? Where is the sailor? Oh, if a magician's wand could strike these waters, and open them up to our view, what a sight should we see ! the slimy hulls of ships long sunk ; the just sunken fish-boat, with ghastly faces twisted among. the nets ; the skeleton suspended in the huge under-grass and monstrous weeds, the black shapes, the fleshless faces looming green in the dripping foam and watery dew ! Yet how gently the swell comes rolling, and how pleasant look the depths, this summer day,—as if Death was not, as if there could be neither storm nor wreck at sea.

More hypochondria, perhaps. Why the calm sea should invari-

ably make us melancholy we cannot tell, but it does so, in spite of all our efforts to be gay. Walt Whitman used to sport in the great waters as happily as a porpoise or a seal, without any dread, with vigorous animal delight ; and we, too, can enjoy a glorious swim in the sun, if there is just a little wind, and the sea sparkles and freshens full of life. But to swim in a dead calm is dreadful to a sensitive man. Something mesmeric grips and weakens him. If the water be deep, he feels dizzy, as if he were suspended far up in the air.

We are harping on delicate mental chords, and forgetting Canna; yet we have been musing in such a mood as Canna must inevitably awaken in all who feel the world. She is so lonely, so beautiful ; and the seas around her are so full of sounds and sights that seize the soul. There is nothing menu, or squalid, or miserable about Canna ; but she is melaucholy and subdued,—she seems, like a Scandinavian Havfru, to sit with her hand to her ear, earnestly listening to the sea.

That, too, is what first strikes one in the Canna people,—their melancholy look,—not grief-worn, not sorrowful, not passionate, but simply melancholy and subdued. We cannot believe they are unhappy beyond the lot of other people who live by labour, and it is quite certain that, in worldly circumstances, they are much more comfortable than the Highland poor are generally. Nature, however, with her wondrous secret influences, has subdued their lives, toned their thoughts, to the spirit of the island where they dwell. This is more particularly the case with the women. Poor human souls, with that dark, searching look in time eyes, those feeble flutterings of the lips! They speak sad and low, as if some- body were sleeping close by. When they step forward and ask you to step into the dwelling, you think (being new to their ways) that some one has just died. All at once, and inevitably, you hear the leaden wash of the sea, and you seem to be walking on a grave.

"A ghostly people !" exclaims the reader ; " keep me from Canna!" That is an error. The people do seem ghostly at first, their looks do sadden and depress ; but the feeling soon wears away, when you find how much quiet happiness, how much warmth of heart may underlie the melancholy air. When they know you a little, ever so little, they brighten, not into anything demonstrative, not into sunniness, but into a silvern kind of beauty, which we can only compare to moonlight. A veil is quietly lifted, and you see the soul's face,—and then you know that these folk are melancholy, not for sorrow's sake, but just as moonlight is melancholy, just as the wash of water is melancholy, because chat is the natural expression of their lives. They are capable of a still, heart-suffering tenderness, very touching to behold.

We visit many of their houses, and hold many of their hands. Kindly, gentle, open-handed as inciting charity, we find them all, the poorest of them as hospitable as the proudest chieftain of their race. There is a gift everywhere for the stranger, and a blessing after,—for they know that after all he is bound for the same bourne.

Theirs is a quiet life, a still passage from birth to the grave ; still, quiet, save for the never-silent voices of the sea. The women work very hard, both indoors and afield. Some of the men go away herring fishing in the season, but the majority find employ- ment either on the island or the circumjacent waters. 1Vo cannot credit the men with great energy of character ; they do not seem industrious. An active mau could not lounge as they lounge, with that total abandonment of every nerve and muscle. They will lie in little groups for hours looking at the sea, and biting stalks of grass,—not seeming to talk, save when one makes a kind of grunting observation, and stretches out his limbs a little further. Some one comes and says, "There are plenty of herring over in Loch Scavaig—a Skye boat got a great haul last night." Perhaps the loungers go off to try their luck, but very likely they say, " Wait till to-morrow—it may be all untrue ;" and in all pro- bability, before they get over to the fishing ground, the herrings have disappeared.

Yet they can work, too, and with a will, when they are fairly set on to work. They can't speculate, they can't search for profit ; the shrewd man outwits them at every turn. They keep poor,—but keeping poor, they keep good. Their worst fault its their dreaminess ; but surely, as there is light in heaven, if there be blame here, God is to blame here, who gave them dreamy souls ! For our part, keep us from the man who could be born in Canna, live on and on with that ocean murmur around him, and elude dreaminess and a melancholy like theirs !

"Balm!" cries a good soul from a city, "they are lazy, like the Irish, like Jamaica niggers ; they are behind the age—let them die 1" You are quite right, my good soul, and if it will be any comfort to you to hear it, they, and such as they, are dying fast. They can't keep up with you ; you are too clever, too great. You, we have no doubt, could live at Canna, and establish a manufactory for getting the sea turned into salt for export. You wouldn't dream, not you! Ere long these poor Highlanders will die out, and with them will die out gentleness, hospitality, charity, and a few other lazy habits of the race.

In a pensive mood, with a prayer on our lips for the future of a noble race destined to perish, we wander across the island till we come to the little graveyard where the people of Canna go to sleep. It is a desolate spot, with a distant view of the Western Ocean. A rude stone wall, with a clumsy gate, surrounds a small square, so wild, so like the stone-covered hillside all round, that we should not guess its use without being guided by the fine stone mausoleum in the midst. That is the last home of the Lairds of Canna and their kin ; it is quite modern and respectable. Around, covered knee- deep with grass, are the graves of the islanders, with no other memorial stones than simple pieces of rock, large and small, brought from the sea-shore and placed as footstones and headstones. Rugged as water tossing in the wind is the old kirkyard, and the graves of the dead therein are as the waves of the sea.

In a place apart lies the wooden bier, with handspokes, on which they carry the cold men and women hither ; and by its side, a sight indeed to dim the eyes, is another smaller bier, smaller and lighter, used for little children. 'Well, there is not such a long way between parents and offspring ; —the old here are children too, silly in worldly matters, loving, sensitive, credulous of strange tales. They are coming hither, faster and faster ; bier after bier, shadow after shadow. It is the Saxon's day now, the day of pro- gress, the day of civilization, the day of shops ; but high as may be your respect for the commercial glory of the nation, stand for a moment in imagination among these graves, and join me in a prayer for the poor Celts, whom they are carrying, here and in a thousand other kirkyards, to the rest that is without knowledge, and the sleep that is without dream.