IN THE HIGHLANDS 35 



English to the young gentlemen under pain of being 

 dismissed. Dinner was ordered in the kitchen in Gaelic, 

 and all meals were announced by the butler Sim 

 Eachainn in Gaelic — " Tha am hiadh air a hJiord le hJiur 

 cead a bhaintigJiearna " {" The food is on the table, by 

 your leave, my lady "), so the whole atmosphere was 

 thoroughly Gaelic. My younger brother Francis, who 

 was very fluent in the language, did not lose it whilst 

 for some years in the Navy. When he took a big farm 

 in Orkney, where no Gaelic is spoken by the natives, 

 he had so many Gairloch workmen there with him that 

 Gaelic was the order of the day ; and how proud he was 

 when John Mackenzie, the clachair mor (the big mason), 

 and his three stalwart sons were able to beat seven of 

 the best picked Orkney men at dry-stone dyking ! 

 It was a race between Gaelic and English, and Gaelic 

 always won in a canter ! At the death of my elder 

 brother. Sir Kenneth, one of the doctors in attendance, 

 Dr. Adam of Dingwall, told me that he v/ent out of 

 this world and entered his eternal rest repeating verse 

 after verse of the Gaelic Psalms, which had been taught 

 him by my mother in his childhood. 



I ought to mention here that when my mother took 

 charge of the property there was only the one parish 

 school, but she started nine or ten, and her rule was that 

 no child should be taught English until he or she could 

 read simple Gaelic first. What a success her schools all 

 were, and what intelligent scholars they produced ! 

 Not long ago I was in a school where the teacher was 

 an Aberdeenshire woman and the infant class all 

 Gaelic-speaking. They were being taught a little story 



