e
being afraid he would starve with hunger, sent the servant-man with food
to him, but the minister scattered it on the floor. The servant-man
exclaimed, 'The devil's in the man!' In a moment the minister, becoming
calm, answered, 'You are quite right,' then partook of the food, and
returned to his former habits."

The following is a good illustration of an olden chief:--We have many
traditional stories about Saddell Castle, in which Mr. M'Donald or "Righ
Fionghal" resided. He claimed despotic power over the inhabitants of
Kintyre. It is said he knew the use of gunpowder, and often made a bad
use of it. He would for sport shoot people, though they did him no harm,
with his long gun, which was kept in Carradale for a long time after his
death. His character is represented as being very tyrannical. Being
once in Ireland, he saw a beautiful married woman, whom he fancied, and
took away from her husband to Saddell. Her husband followed; but
M'Donald finding him, intended to have starved him to death without his
wife knowing it. He was put in a barn, but he kept himself alive by
eating the corn which he found there. M'Donald removed him to another
place, but a hen came in every day and kept him alive with her eggs.
M'Donald was anxious that the poor man should die, and placed him in
another place, where he got nothing to eat, and it is said the miserable
prisoner ate his own hand, then his arm to the elbow, before he died, and
said, in Gaelic, "Dh'ith mi mo choig meoir a's mo lamh gu'm uilleann. Is
mor a thig air neach nach eiginu fhulang." When they were burying him,
his wife was on the top of the castle, and asked whose funeral it was;
she was told it was Thomson's. "Is it my Thomson?" she inquired. "Yes,"
they replied. She then said they might stop for a little till she would
be with them. She immediately threw herself over the castle wall, and
was carried dead with her husband to the same grave.

Perhaps, after all, Saxon rule has not been such an injury to the Western
Isles of Scotland as some people think. At Kintyre there are plenty of
schools, and parsons and policemen instead of robber chiefs; and if there
are few freebooting expeditions to Ireland and elsewhere, it is quite as
well that people have taken to a more decent mode of life.

Alas! my "to-morrow"--unlike that of the poet, which "never comes"--is at
hand. Under a smiling sky, and on a summer sea, we thread our way past
Arran, or the Lan