man
of the generation older than the generation of Mr. Sharp who might have
drawn Highland life greatly, Robert Buchanan, was diverted all his life,
as Sharp was in the twenties and thirties, from doing what he would to
what would boil the pot, but he left at least one story, a story of
Sutherland, "A Child of Nature," to prove to us what his reading of
Highland life might have been. Had Stevenson been born a Highlander, he
might have given us both novels of the Highlands of the order of "Weir
of Hermiston," and romances really Highland in quality, as "Kidnapped"
and "Catriona" are not.

I suppose that, back of all the failure to deal realistically with
Highland life, this rare attainment of a romance of Highland life at all
faithful to it, is the making of the Highlander into a stage hero by
Scott. There are those to-day who fail to find any glamour in "Waverley"
or "Rob Roy" or "The Legend of Montrose," but it is still there to me,
investing the figures of Fergus MacIvor and the MacGregor and the
Children of the Mist as it did in childhood, when I was so fascinated
that I prized my Campbell plaided paper soldiers next to my Continentals
in blue and buff. In going through an old trunkful of school-books only
the other day, I came upon one of these bonneted fellows, still
wonderfully preserved, in an old atlas of the heavens, and then I knew
all of a flash why it was that the poor boy soldiers that I saw in
Highland accoutrement in the yard of Edinburgh Castle during the Boer
War so disappointed me by their appearance and bearing. They were not
half so brave as the piper who used to make the rounds of my boyhood's
town and bring tears to my eyes with his "Campbells are Comin'." I write
this that my quarrel with much of what Sharp has written of the
Highlands, that portion that seems to me sentimentalized or one-sided,
may not be put down to lack of appreciation of the romance, the
eeriness, and otherworldliness that there unquestionably are in that
life.

It is their aloofness from the everyday story, their unusual use of the
supernatural that has given the longer stories written out of the "Fiona
mood," as Mr. Sharp once spoke of his possession, their appeal to most
readers, but there is here in America a class who put the highest
valuation on the shorter stories Mr. Sharp called "spiritual tales." To
those who hold this view "The Divine Adventure" is of the nature of
revelation. To me it is hardly this, but very int