40 A HUNDRED YEARS 



nails for cofi&ns. It was a common thing, lie said, for 

 a man going to Inverness on some great occasion to 

 bring back a few nails for bis own cofi&n, so that they 

 might be in readiness whenever the last call came. The 

 ordinary way of interment in the time of George's 

 grandfather was to have the dead body swathed in blue 

 homespun, carried on an open bier to the graveyard, 

 and slid down into the grave. His grandfather could 

 remember when, if one lost a hook when trout-fishing, 

 the only way of replacing it was to go to Ceard an 

 Oirthire, the old tinker at Coast (a little hamlet on the 

 bay of Gruinord) and to get him to make one, and to tell 

 him to be sure to put a barb on it ! And in the days 

 of old Jane Charles, who was a sort of connection of the 

 Gairloch family, there was only one looking-glass in the 

 district other than in the Tigh Dige, and the girls had 

 to arrange their hair for church or for a wedding by 

 looking at their faces in a pail of water ! I can quite 

 well remember when not a sack made from jute was to be 

 seen, and one saw the big sixteen or eighteen feet rowing- 

 boats on fine winter days arriving from the outlying 

 townships at the mills at Strath or Boor piled up with 

 bags of oats and barley (or rather bere), all in sheep-skin 

 bags, with a certain amount' of wool still on their out- 

 sides to remind one of their origin. It was rare then to 

 see such a thing as a hempen rope. Ropes for retaining 

 the thatch on the cottages were called seamanan fraoich 

 (heather ropes) and made of heather. Ropes to hold 

 small boats were generally made of twisted birch twigs, 

 while the very best ropes for all other purposes were 

 made of the pounded fibre of bog-fir roots, and a really 



