INTRODUCTION. Xvii 



Lordship thus addressed him : " Your own sense of pro. 

 priety, and your gentlemanly feeling, should prevent your 

 using language which is provocative and offensive ". Poor 

 Donald evidently felt the crushing rebuke, and he " exposed 

 the raw" to an unexpected degree. 



Tormore, the factor, and Tormore, the man, are evidently 

 too widely different persons. Indeed this is the case with 

 most of his class. They have, in many instances, to do 

 the dirty work of employers who would be perfectly ashamed 

 and quite incapable of doing it for themselves, though they 

 are not always ashamed to bask in the sunshine of society 

 in the South on the proceeds of factorial meannesses and 

 accumulated tyrannies on their neglected people and pro- 

 perties in the North. 



EVICTIONS IN THE ISLE OF SKYE. 



I shall now briefly point out the nature of the evidence 

 submitted to the Royal Commision on Evictions from the 

 Island, with many of which I was unacquainted when -I 

 wrote my general history of the Highland Clearances. The 

 extent to which these were carried out in the Isle of Skye, 

 almost quite unknown outside its own borders, is simply 

 astounding, and it is high time they were made as widely 

 known as it is now possible to make them. 



Mr. Neil Nicolson, Torrin, 76 years of age, in his 

 evidence at Broadford, described those carried out on Lord 

 Macdonald's property in the south end of the Island during 

 his own recollection. He was only five years old when 

 the land in Sleat was laid out in crofts, and ten years after, 

 the people were evicted from these lots, to make room for 

 the late Major Macdonald of Water nish. They could not 



