the songs she loves best are those in a
foreign tongue. For more than thirty years hath the unfortunate lady
come to the water's edge daily, and hour after hour continue to sit
motionless on that self-same stone, looking down into the loch. Her
story is now almost like a dim tradition from other ages, and the
history of those who come here often fades away into nothing. Everywhere
else they are forgotten--here there are none who can remember. Who once
so beautiful as the "Fair Portuguese?" It was said at that time that she
was a Nun--but the sacred veil was drawn aside by the hand of love, and
she came to Scotland with her deliverer! Yes, her deliverer! He
delivered her from the gloom--often the peaceful gloom that hovers round
the altar of Superstition--and after a few years of love and life and
joy--she sat where you now see her sitting, and the world she had
adorned moved on in brightness and in music as before! Since there has
to her been so much suffering--was there on her part no sin? No--all
believed her to be guiltless, except one, whose jealousy would have seen
falsehood lurking in an angel's eyes; but she was utterly deserted; and
being in a strange country, worse than an orphan, her mind gave way; for
say not--oh say not--that innocence can always stand against shame and
despair! The hymns she sings at midnight are hymns to the Virgin; but
all her songs are songs about love, and chivalry, and knights that went
crusading to the Holy Land. He who brought her from another sanctuary
into the one now before us, has been dead many years. He perished in
shipwreck--and 'tis thought that she sits there gazing down into the
loch, as on the place where he sank or was buried; for when told that he
was drowned, she shrieked, and made the sign of the cross--and since
that long-ago day that stone has in all weathers been her constant seat.

Away we go westwards--like fire-worshippers devoutly gazing on the
setting sun. And another isle seems to shoot across our path, separated
suddenly, as if by magic, from the mainland. How beautiful, with its
many crescents, the low-lying shores, carrying here and there a single
tree quite into the water, and with verdant shallows guarding the lonely
seclusion even from the keel of canoe! Round and round we row, but not a
single landing-place. Shall we take each of us a fair burthen in his
arms, and bear it to that knoll, whispering and quivering through the
twilight with a few birches wh