i 7 4 HIGHLAND SINGING.

ground their arms. They proceed with great alacrity, it being disgraceful for anyone to be out ot time: with the sickle " ' Accord- ing to Pennant, " in the songs of the rowers the notes are commonly long, the airs solemn and slow, rarely cheerful, it being impossible for the oars to keep a quick time ; the words generally have a re- ligious turn, consonant to that of the people." 1 Ramsay of Ochter- tyre says that " the women's songs are in general very short and plaintive. In travelling through the remote Highlands in harvest, the sound of these little bands on every side has a most pleasing effect on the mind of a stranger." The custom, we learn from him, was rapidly dying out at the end of last century/ 1 I did not myself hear any of this singing in my wanderings ; but a Scotch friend tells me that more than forty years ago she remembers seeing a field in which thirty Highland reapers were at work in couples, a man and a woman together, all singing their Gaelic songs.

Three or four hours' stout rowing brought the boat to the shore below the Laird of Raasay's house. " The approach to it," says Boswell, " was very pleasing. We saw before us a beautiful bay, well defended by a rocky coast ; a good family mansion ; a fine verdure about it, with a considerable number of trees ; and beyond it hills and mountains in gradation of wilclness." At the entrance to the bay is a rocky islet, where we landed, when we visited Raasay on the after- noon of a bright June clay. As it was unoccupied, we took formal possession, with a better claim than the European nations have to the well-peopled islands of the Southern Seas. Its name, we learnt from our boatman, was Goat Island, and just as Johnson was addressed as Island Isa, so we were willing to derive our title from our new acquisition. We passed a full half an hour in our domain with great satisfaction. Who, we asked, " would change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand ? " The waves beat on our coast, break- ing in white crests far away in the open sound. We looked across the little bay on the sunny shore of our nearest neighbour, the Laird of Raasay, and did not envy him the pleasant grassy slope, almost ready for the scythe, which stretched from his mansion to the edge of the sea, or the fine woods which covered the hills at the back of his house. We thought how much the scene is changed since our travellers saw it. Then there was no landing-place ;

1 Letters from a Gentleman in the North oj ]< Scotland and Scotsmen in tin Eighteenth

Scotland, ii. 142. Century, ii. 410, 415.

- Voyage to the Hebrides, ed. 1774, p. 291.

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