The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1890-08-03

rem 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
crofter's hut genuine bit of Highland
folk lore. Except in the out of-the way
glens of Skye and Lewis and the extreme
north of Scotland, it must be rare now to
lind an old wife or an old man in whose
memory dwells any of the old tales. Most
or the peasants whom one meets about
Oban, and from Glencoe down to Loeb
Lomond and Loeb katrine, seem destitute
of any spark of Imagination.
THE LOT OF TIE SKYE CRoFTER's WIFE
is not an easy one Wherever there is
bit of land fertile enough to yield crop,
the women do much of the harvesting /
have seen them hoeing potatoes with curl
Gus old hoes having wooden blades, evil
IDENTIFY of home manufacture. But every
year there is less and less land under Guilt
vation- Last night, just at sunset, |
watched man and his wife cutting peat.
He lifted the large blocks with his spade
and she divided them into bricks and laid
them up into little stacks to dry As | APP
preached they finished their days work
He lifted to his shoulder root of bog wood
found under the turf and she turned up
her skirt like a fishwife's 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 the different landscape and
and the different race, they were not un-
like two of Mlllais peasants in their plod-
ding melancholy against the twilight sky,
1t is a lonely island, where one may
thread the glens for hours without passing
hut or human being; all the colors
dark, and little blooming but the hot
heather; but some morning it may be ones
fortune TO surprise little clachan in
THE BUsTLE OF WASHING DAY.
The women of two or three clustered
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 little
from Kettle, turns up her skirts steps into
her washtub and treads out the clothes
with her feet instead of rubbing them with
her hands. Bundle after bundle of coarse,
dark-colored flannel-much of it home
woven-iS brought out. One sees little
| linen, except the piuafores 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. Aoove the
Tapping of wet wool one hears the scream
ing of the gulls and perhaps the far off
bleat of lamb.
The silence is the more noticeable be-
cause formerly the Gaels had tongues.
Once and once only have heard woma n
sing. She was young, sturdly built, with
a pleasant sun Drowned face and dark hair
combed back plainly and wound 10 a coil.
The women OF Skye, as well say here as
anywhere, are good-looklng peasant types,
but anything rising above average attrac-
tiveness is rare. They are stronger and
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 the waist
behind. Their dark skirts are short and
plain.
! THE GIRL WHO SANG.
was milking one of the longhaired, long
horned Highland cattle that are being
driven out uy sheep, even az the sheep are
being displaced to make room for deer.pre-
serves. Dame Mcqueen tells me there are
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 l am not sure that
| have them. This is something like one
Turn the white-backed black cows, Duncan,
Dark brown, white-faced cows, Duncan;
| Turn the white backed black COWS, Duncan,
And you shall get bonny wife.
l think it was this that / heard The
! other is about the cows of Colin, but have
not yet made it out at all. Dame MCQUEEN
says it Is much more "breagh,n 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 rock-bound
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 Slgachan hotel | 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 home made water wheel A
young Scotchman was telling me day or
two ago that he had seen this operation
performed by two women quite recently,
behind one of the sod novels that here and
there remain, and that an English lady was
saying yesterday, must be ''really 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 human
being.
The crofter is being crowded out of ex
istence by the lords of the soil, who raise a
hundred deer on land that might feed a
] thousand human beings, but when | ask
Dame Mcqueen why they do not go else
where she simply shakes her head This
is home, unless, indeed, it be true that
The Gael has no home under the sun.
1t is ten o'clock, the northern twilight is
closing and darkness setting in. The rain
is falling, and from the shieling's doorstone
near above its downfall, the beating OF
the waves and the screaming of the gulls.
This is sad land.
ELIZA PUTNAM HEAToN.