though his humble ancestors were
located on the spot for centuries, he can find trace among them of but one
Celtic name; and their language was exclusively the Lowland Scotch. For
many ages the two races, like oil and water, refused to mix.

I spent the evening very agreeably with one of the Free Church elders of
the place, Mr. George Petrie, an accomplished antiquary; and found that
his love of the antique, joined to an official connection with the
county, had cast into his keeping a number of curious old papers of the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,--not in the least
connected, some of them, with the legal and civic records of the place,
but which had somehow stuck around these, in their course of
transmission from one age to another, as a float of brushwood in a river
occasionally brings down along with it, entangled in its folds, uprooted
plants and aquatic weeds, that would otherwise have disappeared in the
cataracts and eddies of the upper reaches of the stream. Dead as they
seemed, spotted with mildew, and fretted by the moth, I found them
curiously charged with what had once been intellect and emotion, hopes
and fears, stern business and light amusement. I saw, among the other
manuscripts, a thin slip of a book, filled with jottings, in the antique
square-headed style of notation, of old Scotch tunes, apparently the
work of some musical county-clerk of Orkney in the seventeenth century;
but the paper, in a miserable state of decay, was blotted crimson and
yellow with the rotting damps, and the ink so faded, that the notation
of scarce any single piece in the collection seemed legible throughout.
Less valuable and more modern, though curious from their eccentricity,
there lay, in company with the music, several pieces of verse, addressed
by some Orcadian Claud Halcro of the last age, to some local patron, in
a vein of compliment rich and stiff as a piece of ancient brocade. A
peremptory letter, bearing the autograph signature of Mary Queen of
Scots, to Torquil McLeod of Dunvegan, who had been on the eve, it would
seem, of marrying a daughter of Donald of the Isles, gave the Skye
chieftain, "to wit" that, as he was of the blood royal of Scotland, he
could form no matrimonial alliance without the royal permission,--a
permission which, in the case in point, was not to be granted. It served
to show that the woman who so ill liked to be thwarted in her own amours
could, in her character as the Queen,