The Project Gutenberg EBook of Fians, Fairies and Picts, by David MacRitchie

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Title: Fians, Fairies and Picts

Author: David MacRitchie

Release Date: March 5, 2006 [EBook #17926]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: PLATE I.

SELECTIONAL VIEW AND GROUND PLAN OF UNDERGROUND GALLERY, CALLED _UAMH
SGALABHAD_, NEAR MOL A DEAS, HUISHNISH, ISLAND OF SOUTH UIST.

_Frontispiece._]

FIANS, FAIRIES
AND
PICTS

BY

DAVID MACRITCHIE

AUTHOR OF
"THE TESTIMONY OF TRADITION"

"Sometimes ... it seems that the stones are really
speaking--speaking of the old things, of the time when the strange
fishes and animals lived that are turned into stone now, and the
lakes were here; and then of the time when the little Bushmen lived
here, so small and so ugly, and used to sleep in the wild dog
holes, and in the 'sloots,' and eat snakes, and shoot the bucks
with their poisoned arrows ... Now the Boers have shot them all, so
that we never see a little yellow face peeping out among the stones
... And the wild bucks have gone, and those days, and we are
here."--WALDO, in _The Story of an African Farm._

_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUeBNER & CO., LTD.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1893

INTRODUCTION.

The following treatise is to some extent a re-statement and partly an
amplification of a theory I have elsewhere advanced.[1] But as that
theory, although it has been advocated by several writers, especially
during the past half-century, is not familiar to everybody, some remarks
of an explanatory nature are necessary. And if this explanation assumes
a narrative form, not without a tinge of autobiography, it is because
this seems the most convenient way of stating the case.

It is now a dozen years or thereabouts since I first read the "Popular
Tales of the West Highlands," by Mr. J.F. Campbell, otherwise known by
his courtesy-title of "Campbell of I