ht of the summer
traffic, and when one gets there, it is a problem how to get away. I
asked the captain of the _Glencoe_ to set me down near what is called
the _dry island_, in Loch Hourn, and thence I was rowed ashore by two
very wild-looking, unkempt boatmen. The school-house, where I lodged, is
right on the beach, and just at the base of the gigantic Ben Screel.
Twelve miles along the coast, by a road of the most awe-inspiring kind,
one comes to the interesting nook of Glenelg, with its Pictish towers
and ruined barracks.

It was a mild and hazy morning when I traversed the road between
Arnisdale and Glenelg. On coming to the summit, a great breeze arose and
drove away the heavy white mists from the Sound of Sleat, and showed the
white, sentinel-like lighthouse of Isle Ornsay and great fertile
stretches of the near portion of Skye. Reluctantly the clouds finally
curled and rolled away before the wind and the glitter of the sun, until
the Cuchullins were visible beyond the water and the green peninsula of
Sleat.

In a cosy recess near the highest part of the road, beside a bubbling
spring, a _gipsy family_ had pitched its tent. I admired the taste shown
in the selection of a place commanding such a view. The family was still
under canvas, but hanging on the branch of a tree was a worn and
mud-stained skirt. Do not ladies in hotels, in similar fashion, hang out
their dusty and travel-soiled attire at the doors of their chambers? And
perhaps the dark-skinned owner had hung up her dank and dripping weeds
in the hope that some silvan faun or Robin Goodfellow would, without a
tip, perform the dusting process, in this case so palpably necessary. We
do wrong in supposing that imagination is not the portion of these
woodland rovers.

One of the most difficult problems of the Education Department is to see
that gipsy children get a suitable amount of schooling. "Here awa',
there awa', wandering Willie," is applicable to all their tribe. How
can progressive instruction be carried on where there is no fixity of
habitation? One day the camp is pitched on an eminence overlooking Loch
Hourn; but before twelve hours have passed, the nomads may have crossed
the ferry at Kyleakin and be warming their hands round a blaze of stolen
peats in the wild moorland between Portree and Dunvegan. Only in winter,
when frost and snow drive the gipsies into the city slums, do the
children get some smattering of the three R's.

GOLSPIE TECHNI