t did not come out again. They
were discovered, and the eldest son was hanged; he confessed that he had
committed nineteen murders before he left Scotland.

"They were not a nice family."

"The father was a very respectable old man."

The boatman gave me the name of this wicked household, but it is perhaps
better forgotten.

The extraordinary thing is that this appears to be the Highland
introduction to, or part first of, a gloomy and sanguinary story of a
murder hole--an inn of assassins in a lonely district of the United
States, which Mr. Louis Stevenson heard in his travels there, and told to
me some years ago. The details have escaped my memory, but, as Mr.
Stevenson narrated them, they rivalled De Quincey's awful story of
Williams's murders in the Ratcliffe Highway.

Life must still be haunted in Badenoch, as it was on Ida's hill, by forms
of unearthly beauty, the goddess or the ghost yet wooing the shepherd;
indeed, the boatman told me many stories of living superstition and
terrors of the night; but why should I exhaust his wallet? To be sure,
it seemed very full of tales; these offered here may be but the legends
which came first to his hand. The boatman is not himself a believer in
the fairy world, or not more than all sensible men ought to be. The
supernatural is too pleasant a thing for us to discard in an earnest,
scientific manner like Mr. Kipling's Aurelian McGubben. Perhaps I am
more superstitious than the boatman, and the yarns I swopped with him
about ghosts I have met would seem even more mendacious to possessors of
pocket microscopes and of the modern spirit. But I would rather have one
banshee story than fifteen pages of proof that "life, which began as a
cell, with a c, is to end as a sell, with an s." It should be added that
the boatman has given his consent to the printing of his yarns. On being
offered a moiety of the profits, he observed that he had no objection to
these, but that he entirely declined to be responsible for any share of
the expenses. Would that all authors were as sagacious, for then the
amateur novelist and the minor poet would vex us no more.

Perhaps I should note that I have not made the boatman say "whateffer,"
because he doesn't. The occasional use of the imperfect is almost his
only Gaelic idiom. It is a great comfort and pleasure, when the trout do
not rise, to meet a skilled and unaffected narrator of the old beliefs,
old legends, as ancient as the hill