IN THE HIGHLANDS 27 



My uncle, however, refers in his Notes to the '45 

 period in Gairloch, and tells a story of his great-grand- 

 father as related by the family bard, Alasdair Buidhe 

 Maciamhair (Yellow Sandy Mclver). I shall quote 

 from my uncle's Notes about the bard: 



" This reminds me that one of our summer evening's 

 amusements was getting the bard to the dining-room 

 after dinner, where, well dined below stairs and primed 

 by a bumper of port wine, he would stand up, and with 

 really grand action and eloquence, give us poem after 

 poem of Ossian in Gaelic, word for word, exactly as 

 translated by Macpherson not long before then, and 

 stupidly believed by many to be Macpherson's own 

 composition, though had Alasdair heard anyone hinting 

 such nonsense, his stick would soon have made the heretic 

 sensible ! Alasdair could not read or write and only 

 understood Gaelic, and these poems came down to him 

 through generations numberless as repeated by his 

 ancestors round their winter evening fires; and I have 

 known persons as uneducated, who could not only 

 repeat from memory interesting poems like Ossian, 

 but could work out uninteresting complicated sums in 

 arithmetic. Alasdair related as follows: ' Behind the 

 western Tigh Dige rose a mass of rock covered with 

 wood, with a charming grassy level top about one 

 thousand feet above the sea, which in the sheltered 

 woody bay flowed within a thousand yards of the old 

 chateau.' Alasdair told us that in 1745, when men-of- 

 war were searching everywhere for Prince Charlie, one 

 of them came into the bay, and the Captain sent word 

 to our ancestor to come on board. The latter, who really 



