for the low country, and the
remainder removed to the neighbourhood of the inn at which we had spent
our first night, or rather morning, in the place, to build a kitchen and
store-room for the inn-keeper. Among the others, we lost the society of
Click-Clack, who had been a continual source of amusement and annoyance
to us in the barrack all the season long. We soon found that he was
regarded by the Highlanders in our neighbourhood with feelings of the
intensest horror and dread: they had learned somehow that he used to be
seen in the low country flitting suspiciously at nights about
churchyards, and was suspected of being a resurrectionist; and not one
of the ghouls or vampires of eastern story could have been more feared
or hated in the regions which they were believed to infest, than a
resurrectionist in the Western Highlands. Click-Clack had certainly a
trick of wandering about at nights; and not unfrequently did he bring,
on his return from some nocturnal ramble, dead bodies with him into the
barrack; but they were invariably the dead bodies of cod, gurnard, and
hake. I know not where his fishing-bank lay, or what bait he employed;
but I observed that almost all the fish which he caught were ready dried
and salted. Old John Fraser was not without suspicion that there were
occasional interferences on the part of the carter with the integrity of
our meal-barrel; and I have seen the old man smoothing the surface of
the meal just before quitting the barrack for his work, and inscribing
upon it with his knife-point the important moral injunction, "Thou shalt
not steal," in such a way as to render it impossible to break the
commandment within the precincts of the barrel, without, at the same
time, effacing some of its characters. And these once effaced,
Click-Clack, as he was no writer himself, and had no assistant or
confidant, could not have re-inscribed. Ere quitting us for the low
country, I bargained with him that he should carry my blanket in his
cart to Conon-side, and gave him a shilling and a dram in advance, as
pay for the service. He carried it, however, no further than the next
inn, where, pledging it for a second shilling and second dram, he left
me to relieve it as I passed. Poor Click-Clack, though one of the
cleverest of his class, was decidedly half-witted; and I may remark, as
at least curious, that though I have known idiocy in its unmixed state
united to great honesty, and capable of disinterested attach