ted from materials of such venerable age and
rigidity as the roots and trunks of ancient trees, that had been locked
up in the peat-mosses of the district for mayhap a thousand years. Like
the ordinary cordage of the rope-maker, it consisted of three strands,
and was employed for haulsers, the cork-bauks of herring-nets, and the
lacing of sails. Most of the sails themselves were made, not of canvas,
but of a woollen stuff, the thread of which, greatly harder and stouter
than that of common plaid, had been spun on the distaff and spindle. As
hemp and flax must have been as rare commodities of old in the western
Highlands, and the Hebrides generally, as they both were thirty years
ago in Gairloch, whereas moss-fir must have been abundant, and sheep,
however coarse their fleeces, common enough, it seems not improbable
that the old Highland fleets that fought in the "Battle of the Bloody
Bay," or that, in troublous times, when Donald quarrelled with the king,
ravaged the coasts of Arran and Ayrshire, may been equipped with similar
sails and cordage. Scott describes the fleet of the "Lord of the Isles,"
in the days of the Bruce, as consisting of "proud galleys," "streamered
with silk and tricked with gold." I suspect he would have approved
himself a truer antiquary, though mayhap worse poet, had he described it
as composed of very rude carvels, caulked with moss, furnished with
sails of dun-coloured woollen stuff still redolent of the oil, and
rigged out with brown cordage formed of the twisted fibres of moss-fir.
The distaff and spindle was still, as I have said, in extensive use in
the district. In a scattered village in the neighbourhood of our
barrack, in which all the adult females were ceaselessly engaged in the
manufacture of yarn, there was not a single spinning-wheel. Nor, though
all its cottages had their little pieces of tillage, did it boast its
horse or plough. The cottars turned up the soil with the old Highland
implement, the _cass-chron_; and the necessary manure was carried to the
fields in spring, and the produce brought home in autumn, on the backs
of the women, in square wicker-work panniers, with slip-bottoms. How
these poor Highland women did toil! I have paused amid my labours under
the hot sun, to watch them as they passed, bending under their load of
peat or manure, and at the same time twirling the spindle as they crept
along, and drawing out the never-ending thread from the distaff stuck in
their gir