Mu. MAcIAN OF SKYE.-But my chief delight here is my
friend and neighbour, Mr. Madan. 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 strange- ness 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 circu- lates 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 monoto- nous at first, would all at once soar into a higher strain, and then hurry and madden as besting 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 vietorious or disas- trous day, the house in which some great man first saw the light, are to me the saeredest things. This slight grey, keen-eyed man-the scabbard sorely frayed now, the blade sharp and bright as ever-gives me a thrill like an old coin wtth 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 today, 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 attrac- tions oIthe grave ; " for the soil of churchyards once flashed kind eyes on them, heard with them the chimes at midnight, Bang 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 Mac Ian 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 ring-pointed 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, saving, " Those who put them in told me." Heavens, how a century and odd years collapsed, and the bloody field,-the battle smoke not yet cleared away, and where Cumberland's artillery told the clansmen sleeping in thickest swathes,-unrolled itself from the horizon down to my very feet ! For a whole evening he 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 man living in the shadow of Blavin now."-Alexander Smith in Macmillan's Magazine.
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