strongest
city of the Britons." {54} Then the Scots came, and turned the Britons
out; and St. Columba came, and St. Kentigern from Wales (573-574), and
began to spread the Gospel among the pagan Picts and Cymri. Stone
amulets and stone idols, (if the disputed objects are idols and amulets,)
"have had their day," (as Bob Acres says "Damns have had their day,")
and, with Ailcluith in Scots' hands, "'twas time for us to go" thought
the Picts and Cymri of Langbank and Dumbuck.

Sadly they evacuate their old towers or cairns before the Scots who now
command the Dumbuck ford from Dumbarton. They cross to land on their
stone causeway at low water. They abandon the old canoe in the little
dock where it was found by Mr. Bruce. They throw down the venerable
ladder. They leave behind only the canoe, the deer horns,
stone-polishers, sharpened bones, the lower stone of a quern, and the now
obsolete, or purely folk-loreish stone "amulets," or "pendants," and the
figurines, which to call "idols" is unscientific, while to call them
"totems" is to display "facetious and rejoicing ignorance." Dr. Munro
merely quotes this foolish use of the term totem by others.

These old things the evicted Picts and Cymri abandoned, while they
carried with them their more valuable property, their Early Iron axes and
knives, their treasured bits of red "Samian ware," inherited from Roman
times, their amber beads, and the rest of their bibelots, down to the
minutest fragment of pottery.

Or it may not have been so: the conquering Scots may have looted the
cairns, and borne the Pictish cairn-dwellers into captivity.

Looking at any broch, or hill fort, or crannog, the fancy dwells on the
last day of its occupation: the day when the canoe was left to subside
into the mud and decaying vegetable matter of the loch. In changed
times, in new conditions, the inhabitants move away to houses less damp,
and better equipped with more modern appliances. I see the little troop,
or perhaps only two natives, cross the causeway, while the Minstrel sings
in Pictish or Welsh a version of

"The Auld Hoose, the Auld Hoose,
What though the rooms were sma',
Wi' six feet o' diameter,
And a rung gaun through the ha'!"

The tears come to my eyes, as I think of the Last Day of Old Dumbuck,
for, take it as you will, there _was_ a last day of Dumbuck, as of windy
Ilios, and of "Carthage left deserted of the sea."

So ends my little idyllic interlude, a