8 
LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES, 
I confess I had great pride in being able to show my 
companion so fair a specimen of one of our lordly island 
homes—the birthplace of a race of nobles whose names 
sparkle down the page of their country’s history, as 
conspicuously as the golden letters in an illuminated 
missal. 
While descending towards the strand, I tried to 
amuse Sigurdr with a sketch of the fortunes of the 
great house of Argyll. 
I told him how in ancient days three warriors . 
came from green Ierne, to dwell in the wild glens of 
Cowal and Lochow,—how one of them, the swart 
Breachdan, all for the love of blue-eyed Eila, swam the 
Gulf, once with a clew of thread, then with a hempen 
rope, last with an iron chain; but this time, alas! the 
returning tide sucks down the too heavily weighted hero 
4 
into its swirling vortex;—how Diarmid O’ Dublin, i.e. 
son of “ the Brown,” slew with his own hand the mighty 
boar, whose head still scowls over the escutcheon of the 
Campbells;—how in later times, while the murdered 
Duncan’s son, afterwards the great Malcolm Canmore, 
was yet an exile at the Court of his Northumbrian 
uncle, ere Birnam Wood had marched to Dunsinane, the 
