| Show 1H THE SHIELINGS Housekeeping j la Crofters Hut S In Skye I LONELY HOVELS IN LONELY GLENS Where the Peat Smouhlurs on the Earth and the Thatchis Held Down by Stones Irish Scenes S GLEX SLW tHAN Isle of Skye July 23 lS9ilSpecial borraapondenco to THE HcitAM When the suit dances on these nortnern waers the western highlands are glorious but when the clouds are black and the mountains are blueblack and the sea is blncgroln it would be hard to find on the face of tho globe scones more desolate deso-late more savage Thcra looms out of the mist Behind mo the fierce crag ct the ScurinaUillcan the peak of the Yonng Men Through the rain that is sleet not far up its sides one cannot fully see the wonderful sharpness and steepness of its precipices which threaten danger and death to the unwary mountaineer This morning I made out patches of snow lying in its gorges All along the bleak track crossing HIS UUEARY MOOKTAXD to the right the Titanic watering pot has been filled and refilled to the discomfort of the black faced melancholy sheop huddled under the lea of a gray stone Over the i sean front tho gullscircle screaming and 19n tne thwart of a herring fishers boat a black ccraiorant is sitting Everywhere I tha basaltic rock crops out darkcolored and barren and theres not a crumb Qf human comfort Save in the bedtime story Dame McQueen is telling her bairns Dame McQueens shieling is the best in the clachan It has two rooms Tho three or four other huts that make up the little village have so far as I have looked into them only oneoWhence made yo tho walk she asked me when I stopped to see if she could jell me oatcake for my sup per Damo McQueen has the Gaelic but she speaks also a ilittlc English which is more than do some of her neighbors It required persuasion to induce her to keep me over night but the storm was breaking break-ing and no other shelter reachable DAME MCQUEENS HUT Is built of round stones the granite of the neighborhood laid to all appearance without with-out mortar Its thatch is straw and sticks intermingled and the binding pole that runs along what in a more pretentious mansion one would call the eaves is weighted and held in place against the gales of winter by huge stones hanging by straw ropes to the ground It has a low door in the middle of the side One stoops in entering from the apprehension if not necessity A rough partition separates the kitchen and the bedroom each is about seven feet high and is floored imnerfectlv with a rude stone flagging Tho walls are I unfinished precisely as on the outside but in the tny bedchamber in which 1 am writing there has been addeda touch of re fining elegance the shape of breadths of coarse white cotton cloth stretched across at the level of > the top of the sidewalls to form a ceiling below the thatch but now sagging oddly in billowy festoons The furniture is prosiac enougha low bedspread bed-spread with dark handwoven blankets and a wooden chair There is a window slit very small to save glass and to see well one must open the door The kitchen is moro prlrnitivo and more interestng In the end s the open stone fireplace whore PEAT IS SMOLPEKIXG its pungent smell filling the air and the heavy flakes of its soot banging down from the chimney At one side of the fire sits Dame McQueen on a roughly squared block of stone Yesterday on the snore of a lonely loch miles from any other habitation habita-tion I found a hut whose furniture barring one ordinary chair of commerce that looked incongruously modern among such surroundings sur-roundings consisted of sticks of ships timber washed ashore from wrecks Prom the thatch overhead rows of red dishbrown fishing nets are hanging There is a spinning wheel a shelf with crockery a table and in every corner there being no place to stole them are heaped ropes fish baskets and such articles arti-cles of clothing as are not walking about on the backs of the family For supper we ate potatoes and brose the barefooted children in their short and dilapidated brown frocks sitting with their share on the floor and shaking back at intervals the dark hair that hung over their eyes The children are disappointed at the nonarri val of the father who should have been home from a fishing trip This might bo done or that if only he would come I THERE ARE LONG HORNS says the mother on cattle in the mist which I take to be the cotters way of remarking re-marking on the size of the fish one does not catch and the beauties of the things that are not to be I wish I could understand the gutturals 5 and the aspiratioris of the Gaelic that is malting tnose same urchins so round eyed I must ask Dame McQueen to English her firelight story for me She says it is the tale of Maol achlio bain Her grandmother used to tell it to her I cannot catch all the words of her northern tongue but sha seems to say that once there was a widow whose three daughters desired to go and seek their for tunes So she baked three bannocks and asked the oldest Will you have the smal ler half with blessing or the bigger half with my curse Now the daughter was hungry and said I will take the bigger half and your curse And the second daughter said the same but the little sister sis-ter Maola chliobain chose the smaller part and the blessing So the mother gave her all greatly to the disgust tho other sis ters who tied her to a rock and then to a peatstack and then to a tree that she should not go with them but she came after carrying on her back the rock ana the peat stack and the tree They reached the giants house and slept in tho bed with the giants three daughters In the night thy giant said to his bald redskinned son Kill me one ofthe strange girlsa And the son said How shall I know them i 5 And the giant said My daughters have turns or amber beads about their necks but the strange girls have turns of hair But Maolachiiobain heard the giant and she took the TURNS OF AMBEU BEADS off the necks of the giants daughters and put them on the necks of her sisters so when tho giants son came to the bed he killed one of the giants daughters and the giant drank her blood and this lie did to the second and the third Then Maolii chliobain hope I am geitiiig this individuals individ-uals name with arm degree to cornet nessarose and took her sisters on her back and lied Tho giant came after and the sparks trodden out from her heels hit his forehead and the sparks trodden out from the points of his feet hit tho back of her head but she leaped a brook and he could not follow Then he said You are over overAnd she answered Yes if it vex you You killed my three bald redskinned daughters Yes if it vex iU1 When will youcome againl When my concerns bring me Y1aoe c and hersiaterabayej I f utI J l f 1 S r 5 l 5 5 5 5 any number of other adventures in all of which she acts the heroine hut the children child-ren have taken their blankets and rolled themselves up on the floor there is only one bed in the schieling and I must let fade without too much blowing of the embers my pleasure at hearing in a Skye crofters hut a genuine bit of Highland folk lore Except in the outoftheway glens of Skye and Lewis and the extreme north of Scotland itmust bo rare now to find an old wife or an old man in whose memory dwells any of the old tales Most I of the peasants whom one meets about Oban and from Glencoe down to Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine seem destitute of any spuk of Imagination THE LOT OF THE SKI E CROFTERS WIFE is not an easy one Wherever there is a bit of land fertile enough to yield a crop the women do muchof the harvesting I have seen them hoeing potatoes with curious curi-ous old hoes havinp wooden blades evidently evi-dently of home manufacture But every year there is less and less land under cultivation culti-vation Last night just at sunset I watched a man and his wife cutting peat lie lifted the large blocks with his spade and she divided theu into bricks and laid them up into little stacks to dry As I approached ap-proached thy finished their days work He lifted Jo his shoulder a root of bog wood found uuder the turf and she turned up her skirt like a fishwifes and came down the path carrying in it a bushel or so of peats for immediate consumption He was all in brown tones and she in dull reds and in spite of tho different landscape and and the different race they were not un like two of Millais peasants in their plodding plod-ding melancholy against the twilight sky It is a lonely island where one may thread the glens for hours without passing a hut or a human bRing all the colors dark and little blooming but the hot heather but some morning it may ba ones fortune to surprise a little clachan in THE BUSTLE OF WASHING DAY The women of two or three blustered i I shielings have built a fire by the brookside and are heating water in an iron kettle Each woman has her wooden tub she dips from the stream to fill it pours in a little from settle turns uphcrskirts steps into her washtub and treads out the clothes with her feet instead of rubbing them with her hands Bundle after bundle of coarse darkcolored flannel mucl1 of it home woveni brought out One sees little linen except the pinafores of the children There is very little gossip among the washerwomen and no laughing Each woman treads and rinses her clothes in silence and little girls tread and rinse in imitation of their mothers Acove the flapping of wet wool oneliears the screaming scream-ing of the gulls and perhaps the far off bleat of a lamb The silence is the more noticeable because be-cause formerly the Gaels had tongues Once and ouco only I have heard a woman sing She was young sturdily built with a pleasant sunbrowned face and dark hair combed back plainly and wound in a coil I The women of SKye as well say here as anywhere are Roodlooking peasant types but anything rising abdvb average attractiveness attrac-tiveness is rare They krfi stronger ana more wholesome in appearance than one would expect from their diet and their toilsome lives They go bareheaded or shawled and wear shoulder shawls crossed on their bosoms and knotted at tho waist behind Their dark skirts are short and plain THE GIRL WHOSAKG was milking one of the longhaire long horned HjgTfland cattle that are being driven out uy sheep even a tae sheep are beingdisplaced to make JOOifl for d < preserves pre-serves Dame + McQuc Jt ells mo thero are 5 two milking songs that the women sing sometimes though they have not now much milking She had lined them for me twice three times but I am not sure that I have them This is something like one Turn the whitebacked black cows Duncan Dade brown whitefaced cows Duncan Turn the white backed black cows Duncan And you shall get a bonny wjfe I think it was this that I heard The other is about the cows of Colin but I have not yet made it out at all Dame McQueen says it is much more breagb that is pretty The Skye cotter is at once fisher and shepherd and even at that ekes out the barest living the hills are so rockbound and the herrings so capricious Some of the women go out to fish in the little open boats in which are dared such stormy cruises and at the Sligachan hotel I have seen them bartering their own catch packed in baskets with bracken and fresh leaves Another of their homely arts is that of grinding their own oats between two stones turned by a homemade water wheel A young Scotchman was telling me a day or two ago that he had seen this operation performed by two women quite recently behind one of the sod hovels that here and there remain and that an English lady was saying yesterday must be really comfortable comfort-able you know they would be quite warm This sod hut is built of turfs walls and thatch and is about the most wretched sty that ever held a human being 5 The crofter is being crowded out of existence ex-istence by the lords of the soil who raise a hundred deer on land that might feeda thousand human beinfs but when I ask Dame McQueen why they do not go elsewhere else-where she simply shakes her head This is home unless indeed it bo true that The Gael has no home under tho sun It is ten oclock thg northern twilight is closing and darkness setting in The rain is fallingand from the hielings doorstone I hear above its downfall the beating of tho waves and the screaming of the gulls This is a sad land landELIZA ELIZA PUTNAM HEATOX |
