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 THE ISLE OF DREAMS
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 BY 
 FIONA MACLEOD 
 
 Portland, Maine 
 
 THom^s *B. :moshei^ 
 
 Mdccccix
 
 Tbii Second Edition 
 on Van Odder paper 
 consists of 925 copies. 
 
 COPVRlGHr 
 
 THOMAS B. MOSHER 
 
 1905
 
 TO 
 
 YIOLIN GRAIN 
 
 THIS BOOK OF DREAMS AND MEMORIES 
 F. M.
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS
 
 A FEW places in the world are to be held 
 holy, because of the love which conse- 
 crates them and the faith which enshrines 
 them. Their names are themselves talismans 
 of spiritual beauty. Of these is lona. 
 
 But to write of lona, there are many ways 
 of approach. No place that has a spiritual 
 history can, to those who know nothing of 
 it, be revealed by facts and descriptions. The 
 approach may be through the obscure glens 
 of another's mind and so out by the moonlit 
 way, as well as by the track that thousands 
 travel. I have nothing to say here of lona's 
 acreage, or fisheries, or pastures: nothing of 
 how the islanders live. These things are 
 the accidental. There is small difference in 
 simple life anywhere. Moreover, there are 
 many to tell all that need be known. 
 
 There is one lona, a little island of the 
 west. It is but a small isle, fashioned of a 
 little sand, a few grasses salt with the spray 
 of an ever-restless wave, a few rocks that 
 wade in heather and upon whose brows the 
 sea-wind weaves the yellow lichen. But in 
 this little island a lamp was lit whose flame
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 lighted pagan Europe, from the Saxon in his 
 fens to the swarthy folk who came by Greek 
 waters to trade the Orient. Here Learning 
 and Faith had their tranquil home, when the 
 shadow of the sword lay upon all lands, from 
 Syracuse by the Tyrrhene Sea to the rainy 
 isles of Orcc. From age to age, lowly hearts 
 have never ceased to ease their burthen here. 
 To tell the story of lona would be to go back 
 to God, and to end in God. There is another 
 lona, of which I would speak. I do not say 
 that it lies open to all. It is as we come 
 that we find. If we come, bringing nothing 
 with us, we go aw^ay ill-content, having seen 
 and heard nothing of what we had vaguely 
 expected to see or hear. It is another lona 
 than the lona of sacred memories and 
 prophecies : lona the metropolis of dreams. 
 None can understand it who does not see it 
 through its pagan light, its Christian light, its 
 singular blending of paganism and romance 
 and spiritual beauty. There is, too, an lona 
 that is more than Gaelic, that is more than a 
 place rainbow-lit with the seven desires of 
 the world, the lona that, if we will it so, is a 
 mirror of your heart and of mine. 
 
 And that is why I would speak here of 
 lona as befalls my pen, rather than as per- 
 haps my pen should go : and choose legend 
 and remembrance, and my own and other
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 memories and associations, and knowledge 
 of my own and others, and hidden meanings, 
 and beauty and strangeness surviving in 
 dreams and imaginations, rather than facts 
 and figures, that others could adduce more 
 deftly and with more will. 
 
 I 
 
 When I was a child I used to throw offer- 
 ings — small coins, flowers, shells, even 
 a newly caught trout, once a treasured 
 flint arrow-head — into the sea-loch by 
 which we lived. My Hebridean nurse had 
 often told me of Shony, a mysterious sea- 
 god, and I know I spent much time in 
 wasted adoration : a fearful worship, not 
 unmixed with disappointment and some 
 anger. Not once did I see him. I was 
 frighted time after time, but the sudden cry 
 of a heron, or the snort of a pollack chasing 
 the mackerel, or the abrupt uplifting of a 
 seal's head, became over-familiar, and I 
 desired terror, and could not find it by the 
 shore. Inland, after dusk, there was always 
 the mysterious multitude of shadow. There, 
 too, I could hear the wind leaping and growl- 
 ing. But by the shore I never knew any 
 dread, even in the darkest night. The sound 
 and company of the sea washed away all 
 fears.
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 I was amused not long ago to hear a little 
 girl singing, as she ran wading through the 
 foam of a troubled sunlit sea, as it broke on 
 those wonderful white sands of lona — 
 
 "Shanny, Shanny, Shanny, 
 Catch my feet and tickle my toes ! 
 And if you can, Shanny, Shanny, Shanny, 
 I'll go with you where no one knows ! " 
 
 I have no doubt this daintier Shanny was 
 my old friend Shony, whose more terrifying 
 way was to clutch boats by the keel and 
 drown the sailors, and make a death-necklace 
 of their teeth. An evil Shony ; for once he 
 netted a young girl who was swimming in a 
 loch, and when she would not give him her 
 love he tied her to a rock, and to this day 
 her long brown hair may be seen floating in 
 the shallow green wave at the ebb of the 
 tide. One need not name the place I 
 
 The Shanny song recalls to me an old 
 Gaelic-alphabet rhyme, wherein a Maigh- 
 deann-Mhara, or Mermaid, stood for M, and 
 a Suire (also a mermaid) stood for s ; and my 
 long perplexities as to whether I would know 
 a shuera from a midianmara when I saw 
 either. It also recalls to me that it was from 
 a young schoolmaster priest, who had come 
 back from Ireland to die at home, that I first 
 heard of the Beth-Luis-Nuin, the old Gaelic 
 equivalent of " the A B c." Every letter in
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 the Gaelic alphabet is represented by a tree, 
 and Beithe and Luis and Nuin are the Birch, 
 the Rowan, and the Ash. The reason why the 
 alphabet is called the Beth-Luis-Nuin is that 
 B, L, N, and not A, B, c, are its first three 
 letters. It consists of eighteen letters — 
 and in ancient Gaelic seventeen, for H (the 
 Huath, or Whitethorn) does not exist there, 
 I believe : and these run, b, l, n, f, s (h), 
 D, T, c, M, G, p, R, A, o, u, E, I — each letter 
 represented by the name of a tree, " Birch, 
 Rowan, Ash," etc. Properly, there is no c 
 in Gaelic, for though as a signature the letter 
 c is common, it has always the sound of K. 
 Since this page first appeared I have had 
 so many letters about the Gaelic alphabet of 
 to-day that I take the opportunity to add a 
 few lines. To-day as of old all the letters 
 of the Gaelic alphabet are called after trees, 
 from the oak to the shrub-like elder, with the 
 exception of G, T, and u, which stand for 
 the Ivy, Furze, and Heather. It no longer 
 runs B, L, N, etc., but in sequence follows 
 the familiar and among western peoples 
 universal A, B, c, etc. It is, however, short 
 of our Roman alpbabet by eight letters, j, k, 
 Q, V, w, X, Y, and z. On the other hand 
 each of these is represented, either by some 
 other letter having a like value or by a 
 combination : thus, K is identical with c,
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 which does not exist in Gaelic as a soft 
 sound any more than it does in Greek, but 
 only as the c in English words such as cat ox 
 cart, or in combination with -^ as a gutteral, 
 as in loch — while V, as common a sound in 
 Gaelic as the hiss of s in English, exists 
 in almost every second or third word as bh 
 or nth. The Gaelic a b c of to-day, then, 
 runs as follows: Ailm, Beite, Coll, Dur, 
 Eagh, Fearn, Gath, Huath, logh, Luis, 
 Muin, Nuin, Oir, Peith, Ruis, Suil, Teine, 
 
 Ur which, again, is equivalent to saying 
 
 Elm, Birch, Hazel, Oak, Aspen, Alder, Ivy, 
 Whitethorn, Yew, Rowan or Quicken, Vine, 
 Ash, Spindle-tree, Pine, Elder, Willow, Furze, 
 Heath. 
 
 The little girl who knew so much about 
 Shanny knew nothing but of her own ABC. 
 But I owe her a debt, since through her I 
 came upon my good friend " Gunainm." 
 From her I heard first, there on lona, on a 
 chance visit of a few summer days, of two of 
 the most beautiful of the ancient Gaelic 
 hymns, the Fiacc Hymn and the Hymn of 
 Broccan. My friend had delineated them 
 as missals, with a strangely beautiful design 
 to each. How often I have thought of one, 
 illustrative of a line in the Fiacc Hymn : 
 " There was pagan darkness in Eire in those 
 days : the people adored Faerie." In the 
 
 8
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Broccan Hymn (composed by one Broccan 
 in the time of Lugaid, son of Loegaire, a. d. 
 500) is one particularly lovely line : " Victo- 
 rious Bride (Bridget) loved not this vain 
 world : here, ever, she sat the seat of a bird 
 on a cliff." 
 
 In a dream I dream frequently, that of 
 being the wind, and drifting over fragrant 
 hedgerows and pastures, I have often, 
 through unconscious remembrance of that 
 image of St. Bride sitting the seat of a bird 
 on the edge of the cliff that is this world, 
 felt myself, when not lifted on sudden warm 
 fans of dusk, propelled as on a swift wing 
 from the edge of a precipice. 
 
 I would that we had these winds of dream 
 to command. I would, now that I am far 
 from it, that this night at least I might pass 
 over lona, and hear the sea-doves by the 
 ruins making their sweet mournful croon of 
 peace, and lift, as a shadow gathering phan- 
 tom flowers, the pale orchis by the lapwing's 
 nest. 
 
 II 
 
 As a child I had some wise as well as 
 foolish instruction concerning the nations of 
 Faerie. If, in common with nearly all happy 
 children, I was brought up in intimate, even 
 in circumstantial, knowledge of " the fairies "
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 — being charitably taught, for one thing, so 
 that I have often left a little bowl of milk, a 
 saucerful of oatcake and honey, and the like, 
 under a wooden seat, where they would be 
 sure to see it — I was told also of the Sidhe, 
 often so rashly and ignorantly alluded to as 
 the fairies in the sense of a pretty, diminu- 
 tive, harmless, natural folk ; and by my nurse 
 Barabal instructed in some of the ways, 
 spells, influences, and even appearances of 
 these powerful and mysterious clans. 
 
 I do not think, unless as a very young 
 child, I ever confused them, I recollect well 
 my pleasure at a sign of gratitude. I was 
 fond of making little reed or bulrush or ash 
 flutes, but once I was in a place where these 
 were difficult to get, and I lost the only one I 
 had. That night I put aside a small portion 
 of my supper of bread and milk and honey, 
 and remember also the sacrifice of a goose- 
 berry of noble proportions, relinquished, not 
 without a sigh, in favour of any wandering 
 fairy lad. 
 
 Next morning when I ran out — three of 
 us then had a wild morning performance we 
 called some fantastic, forgotten name, and 
 ourselves the Sun-dancers — I saw by the 
 emptied saucer my little reed-flute I Here 
 was proof positive 1 I was so grateful for 
 that fairy's gratitude, that when dusk came
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 again I not only left a larger supper-dole 
 than usual, but, decked with white foxglove 
 bells (in which I had unbounded faith), sat 
 drenched in the dew and played my little 
 reed. Any moment (I was sure) a small green 
 fellow would appear, and with wild indigna- 
 tion I found myself snatched from the grass, 
 and my ears dinned now with reproaches 
 about the dew, now with remonstrances 
 against " that frightfu' reed-screeching that 
 scared awa' the varry hens." 
 
 Ah, there are souls that know nothing of 
 fairies, or music 1 
 
 III 
 
 But the Sidhe are a very different people 
 from the small clans of the earth's delight. 
 
 However (though I could write of both a 
 great volume), I have little to say of either 
 just now, except in one connection. 
 
 It is commonly said that the People of 
 the Sidhe dwell within the hills, or in the 
 underworld. In some of the isles their 
 home, now, is spoken of as Tir-na-thonn, 
 the Land of the Wave, or Tir-fo-Tuinn, the 
 Land under the Sea. 
 
 But from a friend, an islander of lona, I 
 have learned many things, and among them, 
 that the Shee no longer dwell within the 
 inland hills, and that though many of them
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 inhabit the lonelier isles of the west, and 
 in particular The Seven Hunters, their 
 Kingdom is in the North. 
 
 Some say it is among the pathless moun- 
 tains of Iceland. But my friend spoke to an 
 Iceland man, and he said he had never seen 
 them. There were Secret People there, but 
 not the Gaelic Sidhe. 
 
 Their Kingdom is in the North, under 
 the Fir-Chlisueach, the Dancing Men, as the 
 Hebrideans call the polar aurora. They are 
 always young there. Their bodies are white 
 as the wild swan, their hair yellow as honey, 
 their eyes blue as ice. Their feet leave no 
 mark on the snow. The women are white as 
 milk, with eyes like sloes, and lips like red 
 rowans. They fight with shadows, and are 
 glad ; but the shadows are not shadows to 
 them. The Shee slay great numbers at the 
 full moon, but never hunt on moonless 
 nights, or at the rising of the moon, or when 
 the dew is falling. Their lances are made 
 of reeds that glitter like shafts of ice, and it 
 is ill for a mortal to find one of these lances, 
 for it is tipped with the salt of a wave that 
 no living thing has touched, neither the 
 wailing mew nor the finned sgadan nor his 
 tribe, nor the narwhal. There are no men 
 of the human clans there, and no shores, 
 and the tides are forbidden.
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Long ago one of the monks of Columba 
 sailed thither. He sailed for thrice seven 
 days till he lost the rocks of the north ; and 
 for thrice thirty days, till Iceland in the 
 south was like a small bluebell in a great 
 grey plain ; and for thrice three years among 
 bergs. For the first three years the finned 
 things of the sea brought him food; for the 
 second three years he knew the kindness of 
 the creatures of the air; in the last three 
 years angels fed him. He lived among the 
 Sidhe for three hundred years. When he 
 came back to lona, he was asked where he 
 had been all that long night since evensong 
 to matins. The monks had sought him 
 everywhere, and at dawn had found him 
 lying in the hollow of the long wave that 
 washes lona on the north. He laughed at 
 that, and said he had been on the tops of 
 the billows for nine years and three months 
 and twenty-one days, and for three hundred 
 years had lived among a deathless people. 
 He had drunk sweet ale every day, and every 
 day had known love among flowers and green 
 bushes, and at dusk had sung old beautiful 
 forgotten songs, and with star-flame had lit 
 strange fires, and at the full of the moon had 
 gone forth laughing to slay. It was heaven, 
 there, under the Lights of the North. When 
 he was asked how that people might be 
 
 13
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 known, he said that away from there they 
 had a cold, cold hand, a cold, still voice, and 
 cold ice-blue eyes. They had four cities at 
 the four ends of the green diamond that is 
 the world. That in the north was made of 
 earth ; that in the east, of air ; that in the 
 south, of fire ; that in the west, of water. In 
 the middle of the green diamond that is the 
 world is the Glen of Precious Stones. It is 
 in the shape of a heart, and glows like a 
 ruby, though all stones and gems are there. 
 It is there the Sidhe go to refresh their 
 deathless life. 
 
 The holy monks said that this kingdom 
 was certainly Ifurin, the Gaelic Hell. So 
 they put their comrade alive in a grave in 
 the sand, and stamped the sand down upon 
 his head, and sang hymns so that mayhap 
 even yet his soul might be saved, or, at least, 
 that when he went back to that place he 
 might remember other songs than those sung 
 by the milk-white women with eyes like sloes 
 and lips red as rowans. " Tell that honey- 
 mouthed cruel people they are in Hell," said 
 the abbot, " and give them my ban and my 
 curse unless they will cease laughing and 
 loving sinfully and slaying with bright lances, 
 and will come out of their secret places and 
 be baptized." 
 
 They have not yet come. 
 
 H
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 This adventure of the dreaming mind is 
 another Oran, that fabulous Oran of whom 
 the later Columban legends tell. I think that 
 other Orans go out, even yet, to the Country 
 of the Sidhe. But few come again. It must 
 be hard to find that glen at the heart of the 
 green diamond that is the world ; but, when 
 found, harder to return by the way one came. 
 
 IV 
 
 In the FHire na Naomk Nerennnch is a 
 strangely beautiful if fantastic legend of 
 one Mochaoi, Abbot of n'-Aondruim in 
 Uladh. With some companions he was at 
 the edge of a wood, and while busy in cut- 
 ting wattles wherewith to build a church, 
 "he heard a bright bird singing on the 
 blackthorn near him. It was more beautiful 
 than the birds of the w^orld." Mochaoi 
 listened entranced. There was more in that 
 voice than in the throat of any bird he had 
 ever heard, so he stopped his wattle-cutting, 
 and, looking at the bird, courteously asked 
 who was thus delighting him. The bird at 
 once answered, "A man of the people of 
 my Lord " (that is, an angel). " Hail," said 
 Mochaoi, " and for why that, O bird that is 
 an angel ? " "I am come here by command 
 to encourage you in your good work, but 
 also, because of the love in your heart, to 
 
 IS
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 amuse you for a time with my sweet singing." 
 " I am glad of that," said the saint. There- 
 upon the bird sang a single surpassing sweet 
 air, and then fixed his beak in the feathers of 
 his wing, and slept. But Mochaoi heard the 
 beauty and sweetness and infinite range of 
 that song for three hundred years. Three 
 hundred years were in that angelic song, but 
 to Mochaoi it was less than a hour. For three 
 hundred years he remained listening, in the 
 spell of beauty : nor in that enchanted hour 
 did any age come upon him, or any withering 
 upon the wattles he had gathered; nor in 
 the wood itself did a single leaf turn to a red 
 or yellow flame before his eyes. Where the 
 spider spun her web, she spun no more: 
 where the dove leaned her grey breast from 
 the fir, she leaned still. 
 
 Then suddenly the bird took its beak from 
 its wing-feathers, and said farewell. When 
 it was gone, Mochaoi lifted his wattles, and 
 went homeward as one in a dream. He 
 stared, when he looked for the little wattled 
 cells of the Sons of Patrick. A great church 
 built of stone stood before his wondering 
 eyes. A man passed him, and told the 
 stranger that it was the church of St. 
 Mochaoi. When he spoke to the assembled 
 brothers, none knew him : some thought he 
 had been taken away by the people of the 
 
 i6
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Shee, and come back at fairy-nightfall, which 
 is the last hour of the last day of three 
 hundred years. " Tell us your name and 
 lineage," they cried. " I am Mochaoi, Abbot 
 of n'-Aondruim," he said, and then he told 
 his tale, and they knew him, and made him 
 abbot again. In the enchanted wood a shrine 
 was built, and about it a church grew, " and 
 surpassingly white angels often alighted 
 there, or sang hymns to it from the branches 
 of the forest trees, or leaned with their foot 
 on tiptoe, their eyes on the horizon, their ear 
 on the ground, their wings flapping, their 
 bodies trembling, waiting to send tidings of 
 prayer and repentance with a beat of their 
 wings to the King of the Everlasting." 
 
 There vrere many who thought that 
 Mochaoi was dead, when he was seen no 
 more of his fellow-monks at the forest- 
 monastery of n'-Aondruim in Uladh. But his 
 chronicler knew : " a sleep without decay of 
 the body Mochaoi of Antrim slept." 
 
 I am reminded of the story of Mochaoi 
 when I think of lona. I think she too, 
 beautiful isle, while gathering the kelp of 
 human longings and tears and hopes, strewn 
 upon her beaches by wild waves of the world, 
 stood, enchanted, to listen to a Song of 
 Beauty. " That is a new voice I hear in the 
 wave," we can dream of her saying, and of 
 
 17
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 the answer: "we are the angelical flocks 
 of the Shepherd : we are the Voices of the 
 Eternal : listen a while 1 " 
 
 It has been a long sleep, that enchanted 
 swoon. But Mochaoi awoke, after three 
 hundred years, and there was neither time 
 upon his head, nor age in his body, nor a 
 single withered leaf of the forest at his feet. 
 And shall not that be possible for the Isle of 
 Dreams, whose sands are the dust of martyrs 
 and noble and beautiful lives, which was 
 granted to one man by " one of the people 
 of my lord ? " 
 
 V 
 
 When I think of lona I think often, too, 
 of a prophecy once connected with lona; 
 though perhaps current no more in a day 
 when prophetical hopes are fallen dumb and 
 blind. 
 
 It is commonly said that, if he would be 
 heard, none should write in advance of his 
 times. That I do not believe. Only, it does 
 not matter how few listen. I believe that we 
 are close upon a great and deep spiritual 
 change. I believe a new redemption is even 
 now conceived of the Divine Spirit in the 
 human heart, that is itself as a woman, 
 broken in dreams and yet sustained in faith, 
 patient, long-suffering, looking towards home. 
 
 i8
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 I believe that though the Reign of Peace 
 may be yet a long way off, it is drawing 
 near : and that Who shall save us anew shall 
 come divinely as a Woman, to save as Christ 
 saved, but not, as He did, to bring with Her 
 a sword. But whether this Divine Woman, 
 this Mary of so many passionate hopes and 
 dreams, is to come through mortal birth, or 
 as an immortal Breathing upon our souls, 
 none can yet know. 
 
 Sometimes I dream of the old prophecy 
 that Christ shall come again upon lona, and 
 of that later and obscure prophecy which 
 foretells, now as the Bride of Christ, now as 
 the Daughter of God, now as the Divine 
 Spirit embodied through mortal birth in a 
 Woman, as once through mortal birth in 
 a Man, the coming of a new Presence and 
 Power: and dream that this may be upon 
 lona, so that the little Gaelic island may 
 become as the little Syrian Bethlehem. But 
 more wise it is to dream, not of hallowed 
 ground, but of the hallowed gardens of the 
 soul wherein She shall appear white and 
 radiant. Or, that upon the hills, where we 
 are wandered, the Shepherdess shall call us 
 home. 
 
 From one man only, on lona itself, I have 
 heard any allusion to the prophecy as to the 
 Saviour who shall yet come : and he in part 
 
 19
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 was obscure, and confused the advent of 
 Mary into the spiritual world with the possi- 
 ble coming again to earth of Mary, as another 
 Redeemer, or with a descending of the Divine 
 Womanhood upon the human heart as an 
 universal spirit descending upon awaiting 
 souls. But in intimate remembrance I recall 
 the words and faith of one or two whom I 
 loved well. Nor must I forget that my old 
 nurse, Barabal, used to sing a strange " oran," 
 to the effect that when St. Bride came again 
 to lona it would be to bind the hair and 
 wash the feet of the Bride of Christ. 
 
 One of those to whom I allude was a 
 young Hebridean priest, who died in Venice, 
 after troubled years, whose bitterest vicissi- 
 tude was the clouding of his soul's hope by 
 the wings of a strange multitude of dreams 
 — one of whom and whose end I have else- 
 where written : and he told me once how, 
 " as our forefathers and elders believed and 
 still believe, that Holy Spirit shall come 
 again which once was mortally bom among 
 us as the Son of God, but, then, shall be the 
 Daughter of God. The Divine Spirit shall 
 come again as a Woman. Then for the first 
 time the world will know peace." And when 
 I asked him if it were not prophesied that 
 the Woman is to be bom in lona, he said 
 that if this prophecy had been made it was
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 doubtless of an lona that was symbolic, but 
 that this was a matter of no moment, for 
 She would rise suddenly in many hearts, and 
 have her habitation among dreams and hopes. 
 The other who spoke to me of this Woman 
 who is to save was an old fisherman of a 
 remote island of the Hebrides, and one to 
 whom I owe more than to any other spiritual 
 influence in my childhood, for it was he who 
 opened to me the three gates of Beauty. 
 Once this old man, Seumas Macleod, took 
 me with him to a lonely haven in the rocks, 
 and held me on his knee as we sat watching 
 the sun sink and the moon climb out of the 
 eastern wave. I saw no one, but abruptly he 
 rose and put me from him, and bowed his 
 grey head as he knelt before one who sud- 
 denly was standing in that place. I asked 
 eagerly who it was. He told me that it was 
 an Angel. Later, I learned (I remember my 
 disappointment that the beautiful vision was 
 not winged with great white wings) that the 
 Angel was one soft flame of pure white, and 
 that below the soles of his feet were curling 
 scarlet flames. He had come in answer to 
 the old man's prayer. He had come to say 
 that we could not see the Divine One whom 
 we awaited. " But you will yet see that 
 Holy Beauty," said the Angel, and Seumas 
 believed, and I too believed, and believe.
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 He took my hand, and I knelt beside him, 
 and he bade me repeat the words he said. 
 And that was how I first prayed to Her who 
 shall yet be the Balm of the World. 
 
 And since then I have learned, and do 
 see, that not only prophecies and hopes, and 
 desires unclothed yet in word or thought, 
 foretell Her coming, but already a multitude 
 of spirits are in the gardens of the soul, 
 and are sowing seed and calling upon the 
 wind of the south ; and that everywhere are 
 watching eyes and uplifted hands, and signs 
 which cannot be mistaken, in many lands, 
 in many peoples, in many minds; and, in 
 the heaven itself that the soul sees, the 
 surpassing signature. 
 
 VI 
 
 I recall one whom I knew, a fisherman of 
 the little green island : and I tell this story 
 of Coll here, for it is to me more than the 
 story of a dreaming islander. One night, 
 lying upon the hillock that is called Cnoc- 
 nan-Aingeal, because it is here that St. Colum 
 was wont to hold converse with an angel out 
 of heaven, he watched the moonlight move 
 like a slow fin through the sea : and in his 
 heart were desires as infinite as the waves of 
 the sea, the moving homes of the dead.
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 And while he lay and dreamed, his thoughts 
 idly adrift as a net in deep waters, he closed 
 his eyes, muttering the Gaelic words of an 
 old line 
 In the Isle of Dreams God shall yet fulfil 
 
 Himself anew. 
 Hearing a footfall, he stirred. A man stood 
 beside him. He did not know the man, who 
 was young, and had eyes dark as hill-tarns, 
 with hair light and soft as thistledown ; and 
 moved light as a shadow, delicately treading 
 the grass as the wind treads it. In his hair 
 he had twined the fantastic leaf of the horn- 
 poppy. 
 
 The islander did not move or speak : it 
 was as though a spell were upon him. 
 
 " God be with you," he said at last, utter- 
 ing the common salutation. 
 
 " And with you. Coll mac Coll," answered 
 the stranger. Coll looked at him. Who 
 was this man, with the sea-poppy in his hair, 
 who, unknown, knew him by name ? He 
 had heard of one whom he did not wish to 
 meet, the Green Harper: also of a grey man 
 of the sea whom islesmen seldom alluded 
 to by name: again, there was the Amadan 
 Dhu . . . but at that name Coll made the 
 sign of the cross, and remembering what 
 Father Allan had told him in South Uist, 
 muttered a holy exorcism of the Trinity. 
 
 23
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 The man smiled. 
 
 " You need have no fear, Coll mac Coll," 
 he said quietly. 
 
 " You that know my name so well are 
 welcome, but if ycu in turn would tell me 
 your name I should be glad." 
 
 " I have no name that I can tell you," 
 answered the stranger gravely; "but I am 
 not of those who are unfriendly. And 
 because you can see me and speak to me, I 
 will help you to whatsoever you may wish." 
 
 Coll laughed. 
 
 " Neither you nor any man can do that. 
 For now that I have neither father nor 
 mother, nor brother nor sister, and my lass 
 too is dead, I wish neither for sheep nor 
 cattle, nor for new nets and a fine boat, nor a 
 big house, nor as much money as MacCailein 
 Mor has in the bank at Inveraora." 
 
 " What then do you wish for. Coll mac 
 Coll ? " 
 
 " I do not wish for what cannot be, or I 
 would wish to see again the dear face of 
 Morag, my lass. But I wish for all the glory 
 and wonder and power there is in the world, 
 and to have it all at my feet, and to know 
 everything that the Holy Father himself 
 knows, and have kings coming to me as the 
 crofters come to MacCailein Mor's factor." 
 
 " You can have that, Coll mac Coll," said 
 
 24
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 the Green Harper, and he waved a withe of 
 hazel he had in his hand. 
 
 " What is that for ? " said Coll. 
 
 " It is to open a door that is in the air. 
 And now, Coll, if that is your wish of all 
 wishes, and you will give up all other wishes 
 for that wish, you can have the sovereignty 
 of the world. Ay, and more than that : you 
 shall have the sun like a golden jewel in the 
 hollow of your right hand, and all the stars 
 as pearls in your left, and have the moon as 
 a white shining opal above your brows, with 
 all knowledge behind the sun, within the 
 moon, and beyond the stars." 
 
 Coil's face shone. He stood, waiting. 
 Just then he heard a familiar sound in the 
 dusk. The tears came into his eyes. 
 
 " Give me instead," he cried, " give me a 
 warm breast-feather from that grey dove of 
 the woods that is winging home to her 
 young." He looked as one moon-dazed. 
 None stood beside him. He was alone. 
 Was it a dream, he wondered ? But a 
 weight was lifted from his heart. Peace fell 
 upon him as dew upon grey pastures. Slowly 
 he walked homeward. Once, glancing back, 
 he saw a white figure upon the knoll, with 
 a face noble and beautiful. Was it Colum 
 himself come again ? he mused : or that 
 white angel with whom the Saint was wont
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 to discourse, and who brought him intimacies 
 of God ? or was it but the wave-fire of his 
 dreaming mind, as lonely and cold and unreal 
 as that which the wind of the south makes 
 upon the wandering hearths of the sea ? 
 
 I tell this story of Coll here, for, as I have 
 said, it is to me more than the story of a 
 dreaming islander. He stands for the soul 
 of a race. It is because, to me, he stands 
 for the sorrowful genius of our race, that I 
 have spoken of him here. Below all the 
 strife of lesser desires, below all that he has 
 in common with other men, he has the live- 
 long unquenchable thirst for the things of 
 the spirit. This is the thirst that makes him 
 turn so often from the near securities and 
 prosperities, and indeed all beside, setting his 
 heart aflame with vain, because illimitable, 
 desires. For him, the wisdom before which 
 knowledge is a frosty breath : the beauty 
 that is beyond what is beautiful. For, like 
 Coll, the world itself has not enough to give 
 him. And at the last, and above all, he is 
 like Coll in this, that the sun and moon and 
 stars themselves may become as trampled 
 dust, for only a breast-feather of that Dove 
 of the Eternal, which may have its birth in 
 mortal love, but has its evening home where 
 are the dews of immortality. 
 
 26
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 VII 
 
 "The Dove of the Eternal." It was from 
 the lips of an old priest of the Hebrides that 
 I first heard these words. I was a child, and 
 asked him if it was a white dove, such as I 
 had seen fanning the sunglow in Icolmkill. 
 
 " Yes," he told me, " the Dove is white, 
 and it was beloved of Colum, and is of you, 
 little one, and of me." 
 
 " Then it is not dead .' " 
 
 " It is not dead." 
 
 I was in a more wild and rocky isle than 
 lona then, and when I went into a solitary 
 place close by my home it was to a stony 
 wilderness so desolate that in many moods 
 I could not bear it. But that day, though 
 there were no sheep lying beside boulders as 
 grey and still, nor whinnying goats (creatures 
 that have always seemed to me strangely 
 homeless, so that, as a child, it was often my 
 noon-fancy on hot days to play to them on 
 a little reed-flute I was skilled in making, 
 thwarting the hill-wind at the small holes to 
 the fashioning of a rude furtive music, which 
 I believed comforted the goats, though why I 
 did not know, and probably did not try to 
 know) : and though I could hear nothing 
 but the soft, swift, slipping feet of the wind 
 among rocks and grass and a noise of the 
 
 27
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 tide crawling up from a sliore hidden behind 
 crags (beloved of swallows for the small 
 honey-flies which fed upon the thyme) : still, 
 on that day, I was not ill at ease, nor in any 
 way disquieted. But before me I saw a 
 white rock-dove, and followed it gladly. It 
 flew circling among the crags, and once I 
 thought it had passed seaward ; but it came 
 again, and alit on a boulder. 
 
 I went upon my knees, and prayed to it, 
 and, as nearly as I can remember, in these 
 words : — 
 
 "O Dove of the Eternal, I want to love 
 you, and you to love me : and if you live on 
 lona, I want you to show me, when I go 
 there again, the place where Colum the Holy 
 talked with an angel. And I want to Uve 
 as long as you. Dove " (I remember thinking 
 this might seem disrespectful, and that I 
 added hurriedly and apologetically), " Dove 
 of the Eternal." 
 
 That evening I told Father Ivor what I 
 had done. He did not laugh at me. He 
 took me on his knee, and stroked my hair, 
 and for a long time was so silent that I 
 thought he was dreaming. He put me 
 gently from him, and kneeled at the chair, 
 and made this simple prayer which I have 
 never forgotten : " O Dove of the Eternal, 
 grant the little one's prayer." 
 
 28
 
 THE ISLE UK DREAMS 
 
 That is a long while ago now, and I have 
 sojourned since in lona, and there and else- 
 where known the wild doves of thought and 
 dream. But I have not, though I have 
 longed, seen again the White Dove that 
 Colum so loved. For long I thought it 
 must have left lona and Barra too, when 
 Father Ivor died. 
 
 Yet I have not forgotten that it is not 
 dead. " I want to live as long as you," was 
 my child's plea : and the words of the old 
 priest, knowing and believing were, " O 
 Dove of the Eternal, grant the little one's 
 prayer." 
 
 VIII 
 
 It was not in Barra, but in lona, that, 
 while yet a child, I set out one evening to 
 find the Divine Forges. A Gaelic sermon, 
 preached on the shoreside by an earnest man, 
 who, going poor and homeless through the 
 west, had tramped the long roads of Mull 
 overagainst us, and there fed to flame a 
 smouldering fire, had been my ministrant in 
 these words. The " revivalist " had spoken 
 of God as one who would hammer the evil 
 out of the soul and weld it to good, as a 
 blacksmith at his anvil : and suddenly, with 
 a dramatic gesture, he cried : " This little 
 island of lona is this anvil; God is your
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 blacksmith : but oh, poor people, who among 
 you knows the narrow way to the Divine 
 Forges ? " 
 
 There is a spot on lona that has always 
 had a strange enchantment for me. Behind 
 the ruined walls of the Columban church, 
 the slopes rise, and the one isolated hill of 
 lona is, there, a steep and sudden wilderness. 
 It is commonly called Dun-I (Dooti-ee), for 
 at the summit in old days was an island fort- 
 ress; but the Gaelic name of the whole of 
 this uplifted shoulder of the isle is Slibh 
 Meanach. Hidden under a wave of heath 
 and boulder, near the broken rocks, is a little 
 pool. From generation to generation this has 
 been known, and frequented, as the Fountain 
 of Youth. 
 
 There, through boggy pastures, where the 
 huge-horned shaggy cattle stared at me, and 
 up through the ling and roitch, I cUmbed: 
 for, if anywhere, I thought that from there 
 I might see the Divine Forges, or at least 
 might discover a hidden way, because of the 
 power of that water, touched on the eyelids 
 at sunlift, at sunset, or at the rising of the 
 moon. 
 
 From where I stood I could see the people 
 still gathered upon the dunes by the shore, 
 and the tall, ungainly figure of the preacher. 
 In the narrow strait were two boats, one 
 
 3°
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 being rowed across to Fionnaphort, and the 
 other, with a dun sail burning flame-brown, 
 hanging like a bird's wing against Glas 
 Eilean, on the tideway to the promontory 
 of Earraid. Was the preacher still talking of 
 the Divine Forges ? I wondered ; or were 
 the men and women in the ferry hurrying 
 across to the Ross of Mull to look for them 
 among the inland hills? And the Earraid 
 men in the fishing-smack : were they sailing 
 to see if they lay hidden in the wilderness of 
 rocks, where the muffled barking of the seals 
 made the loneliness more wild and remote ? 
 I wetted my eyelids, as I had so often 
 done before (and not always vainly, though 
 whether vision came from the water, or from 
 a more quenchless spring within, I know 
 not), and looked into the little pool. Alas ! 
 I could see nothing but the reflection of a 
 star, too obscured by light as yet for me to 
 see in the sky, and, for a moment, the shadow 
 of a gull's wing as the bird flew by far over- 
 head. I was too young then to be content 
 with the symbols of coincidence, or I might 
 have thought that the shadow of a wing 
 from Heaven, and the light of a star out of 
 the East, were enough indication. But, as it 
 was, I turned, and w-alked idly northward, 
 down the rough side of Dun Bhuirg (at Cul 
 Bhuirg, a furlong westward, I had once seen 
 
 31
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 a phantom, which I believed to be that of the 
 Culdee, Oran, and so never went that way 
 again after sundown) to a thyme-covered 
 mound that had for me a most singular 
 fascination. 
 
 It is a place to this day called Dun Mana- 
 nain. Here, a friend who told me many 
 things, a Gaelic farmer named Macarthur, 
 had related once a fantastic legend about a 
 god of the sea. Manaun was his name, and 
 he lived in the times when lona was part 
 of the kingdom of the Suderoer. Whenever 
 he willed he was like the sea, and that is not 
 wonderful, for he was bom of the sea. Thus 
 his body was made of a green wave. His 
 hair was of wrack and tangle, glistening with 
 spray ; his robe was of windy foam ; his feet, 
 of white sand. That is, when he was with 
 his own, or when he willed ; otherwise, he 
 was as men are. He loved a woman of the 
 south so beautiful that she was named Dear- 
 sadh-na-Ghreine (Sunshine). He captured 
 her and brought her to lona in September, 
 when it is the month of peace. For one 
 month she was happy : when the wet gales 
 from the west set in, she pined for her own 
 land : yet in the dream-days of November, 
 she smiled so often that Manaun hoped ; but 
 when Winter was come, her lover saw that 
 she could not live. So he changed her into 
 
 32
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 a seal. " You shall be a sleeping woman by 
 day," he said, "and sleep in my diin here on 
 lona : and by night, when the dews fall, you 
 shall be a seal, and shall hear me calling to 
 you from a wave, and shall come out and 
 meet me." 
 
 They have mortal offspring also, it is said. 
 
 There is a story of a man who went to the 
 mainland, but could not see to plough, 
 because the browm fallows became waves 
 that splashed noisily about him. The same 
 man went to Canada, and got work in a 
 great warehouse ; but among the bales of 
 merchandise he heard the singular note of 
 the sandpiper, and every hour the sea-fowl 
 confused him with their crying. 
 
 Probably some thought was in my mind 
 that there, by Dun Mananain, I might find 
 a hidden way. That summer I had been 
 thrilled to the inmost life by coming sud- 
 denly, by moonlight, on a seal moving across 
 the last sand-dune between this place and 
 the bay called Port Ban. A strange voice, 
 too, I heard upon the sea. True, I saw no 
 white arms upthrown, as the seal plunged 
 into the long wave that swept the shore ; 
 and it was a grey skua that wailed above me, 
 winging inland ; yet had I not had a vision 
 of the miracle ? 
 
 But alas ! that evening there was not even 
 
 33
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 a barking seal. Some sheep fed upon the 
 green slope of Manaun's mound. 
 
 IX 
 
 So, still seeking a way to the Divine Forges, 
 I skirted the shore and crossed the sandy 
 plain of the Machar, and mounted the upland 
 district known as Sliav Starr (the Hill of 
 Noises), and walked to a place, to me sacred. 
 This was a deserted green airidh between 
 great rocks. From here I could look across 
 the extreme western part of lona, to where 
 it shelved precipitously around the little 
 Port-a-churaich, the Haven of the Coracle, 
 the spot where St. Columba landed when he 
 came to the island. 
 
 I knew every foot of ground here, as every 
 cave along the wave-worn shore. How often 
 I had wandered in these solitudes, to see the 
 great spout of water rise through the grass 
 from the caverns beneath, forced upward 
 when tide and wind harried the sea-flocksf rom 
 the north ; or to look across the ocean to the 
 cliffs of Antrim, from the Cam cul Ri Eirinn, 
 the Cairn of the Hermit King of Ireland, 
 about whom I had woven many a romance. 
 
 I was tired, and fell asleep. Perhaps the 
 Druid of a neighbouring mound, or the lonely 
 Irish King, or Colum himself (whose own 
 Mound of the Outlook was near), or one of 
 
 34
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 his angels who ministered to him, watched, 
 and shepherded my dreams to the desired 
 fold. At least I dreamed, and thus : — 
 
 The skies to the west beyond the seas 
 were not built of flushed clouds, but of trans- 
 parent flame. These flames rose in solemn 
 stillness above a vast forge, whose anvil was 
 the shining breast of the sea. Three great 
 Spirits stood by it, and one lifted a soul out 
 of the deep shadow that was below ; and one 
 with his hands forged the soul of its dross 
 and welded it anew; and the third breathed 
 upon it, so that it was winged and beautiful. 
 Suddenly the glory-cloud waned, and I saw 
 the multitude of the stars. Each star was 
 the gate of a long, shining road. Many — 
 a countless number — travelled these roads. 
 Far off I saw white walls, built of the pale 
 gold and ivory of sunrise. There again I 
 saw the three Spirits, standing and waiting. 
 So these, I thought, were not the walls of 
 Heaven, but the Divine Forges. 
 
 That was my dream. When I awaked, the 
 curlews were crj'ing under the stars. 
 
 When I reached the shadowy glebe, behind 
 the manse by the sea, I saw the preacher 
 walking there by himself, and doubtless 
 praying. I told him I had seen the Divine 
 Forges, and twice ; and in crude, childish 
 words told how I had seen them. 
 
 35
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 " It is not a dream," he said. 
 I know now what he meant. 
 
 X 
 
 In my childhood I well recall meeting in 
 lona an old man who had come from the 
 glens of Antrim, to me memorable because 
 he was the last Gaelic minstrel of the old 
 kind I have seen. " It was a poor land, 
 Antrim," he said, " with no Gaelic, a bitter 
 lot o' protestantry, and little music." 
 I remember, too, his adding in effect : 
 " It is in the west you should be if you 
 want music, and men and women without 
 coldness or the hard mouth. In Donegal 
 and Mayo and all down Connemara-way to 
 the cliffs of Moher you'll hear the wind an' 
 the voices o' the Shee with never a man to 
 curse the one or the other." I asked him 
 why he had come to lona. It was to see 
 the isle of Colum, he said, " St. Bridget's 
 brother, God bless the pair av' thim." He 
 was on his way to Oban, thence to go to a 
 far place in the Athole country, where his 
 daughter had married a factor who had 
 returned to his own land from the Irish 
 west, and was the more dear to the old man 
 because his only living blood-kin, and because 
 she had called her little girl by the name of 
 
 36
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 the old harper's long-lost love, " my love and 
 my wife." 
 
 The last harper, though he had not his 
 harp with him. He had come from Drogheda 
 in a cattle-boat to Islay (whence he had 
 sailed in a fishing-smack to lona), and his 
 friend the mate had promised to leave the 
 harp and his other belongings at Oban in 
 safe keeping. He had with him, however, 
 a small instrument that he called his little 
 clar. It was something between a guitar and 
 a cithern, suggestive of a primitive violin, 
 and he played on it sometimes with his 
 fingers, sometimes with a short bit of wood 
 like a child's tipcat; and, he said, could 
 make good music with a hazel-wand or "the 
 dry straight rod of a quicken when that's to 
 be had." He said this quaint instrument 
 had come down to him through fifty-one 
 generations : literally, " eleven and twice 
 twenty sheauairean (grandfathers, or elders 
 or forebears)," of whom he could at any 
 moment give the pedigree of ceithir deiig air 
 yhtcht'ad, "four and ten upon twenty" — 
 that is, to translate the Gaelic method of 
 enumeration, " thirty-four." 
 
 This was at the house of a minister then 
 lodging in the island, and it was he who 
 hosted the old harper. He told me, later, 
 that he had no doubt this was the old-world 
 
 37
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 cruit, the Welsh crwth of to-day, and the 
 once colloquial Lowland "crowther," akin to 
 the Roman canora cythara, the "forebear" 
 of the modem Spanish guitar. To this day, 
 I may add, Highlanders (at least in the west) 
 call the guitar the Cruit-Spcinteack. There 
 seems to have been four kinds of " harp " 
 in the old days : the clar or clarsach, the 
 kairneen (ceirnine), the kreemtheencrooth 
 (cream-thine-cruit), and the cionar cruit. 
 The clarsach was the harp proper; that is, 
 the small Celtic harp. The ceirnine was the 
 smaller hand-harp. The " creamthine cruit " 
 had six strings, and w-as probably used 
 chiefly at festivals, possibly for a strong 
 sonance to accentuate chants; while the 
 cionar cruit had ten strings, and was played 
 either by a bow or with a wooden or other 
 instrument. It must have been a cionar- 
 cruit, ancient or a rude later-day imitation, 
 that the old harper had. 
 
 Poor old man, I fear he never played on 
 his harp again ; for I learned later that he 
 had found his Athole haven broken up, and 
 his daughter and her husband about to 
 emigrate to Canada, so that he went with 
 them, and died on the way — perhaps as 
 much from the mountain-longing and home- 
 sickness as from any more tangible ill. 
 
 I have a double memento of him that I 
 
 38
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 value. In Islay he had bought or been given 
 a little book of Gaelic songs (the Scoto-Gaelic 
 must have puzzled him sorely, poor old 
 eirioniiach), and this he left behind him, and 
 my minister friend gave it to me, with much 
 of the above noted down on its end-pages. 
 The little book had been printed early in the 
 century, and was called CeilUirean Binn nan 
 Creagan Aosda, literally " Melodious Little 
 Warblings from the Aged Rock ; " and it 
 has always been dear to me because of one 
 lovely phrase in it about birds, where the 
 unknown Gaelic singer calls them "clann 
 bheag' nam preas," the small clan of the 
 bushes, equivalent in English to " the chil- 
 dren of the bushes." This occurs in a lovely 
 verse — 
 
 " Mu'n cuairt do bhruachaibli ard mo glinn, 
 Biodh luba gheuga 's orra blath, 
 's clann bheag' nam preas a' tabhairst seinn 
 Do chreagaibh aosd oran graidh." 
 
 (" Along the lofty sides of my glen let there 
 be bending boughs clad in blossom, and the 
 children of the bushes making the aged 
 rocks re-echo their songs of love " ) — truly 
 a characteristic Gaelic wish, characteristically 
 expressed. 
 
 And though this that I am about to say 
 did not happen on lona, I may tell it here, 
 for it was there and from an islander I heard 
 
 39
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 it, an old man herding among the troubled 
 rocky pastures of Sguir Mor and Cnoc na 
 Fhiona, in the south of that western part 
 called Sliav Starr — one translation of which 
 might be Wuthering Heights, for the word 
 can be rendered wind-blustery or wind-noisy ; 
 though I fancy that starr is, on lona, com- 
 monly taken to mean a strong coarse grass. 
 (Fhiona here I take to be not the genitive of 
 a name, nor that of " wine," but a misspelling 
 oifiomia, grain.) 
 
 When he was a boy he was in the island 
 of Barra, he said, and he had a foster-brother 
 called Iain Macneil. Iain was bom with 
 music in his mind, for though he was ever a 
 poor creature as a man, having as a child 
 eaten of the bird's heart, he could hear a 
 power o' wonder in the wind.' He had 
 never come to any good in a worldly sense, 
 my old herdsman Micheil said; but it was 
 not from want of cleverness only, but because 
 "he had enough with his music." "Poor 
 man, he failed in everything he did but that 
 — and, sure, that was not against him, for 
 is ann air an traghadh a rugadh e — wasn't he 
 bom when the tide was ebbing? " Besides, 
 
 I An allusion to the Hebridean proverb, Ma. dh' 
 itheas tu cridh an edin, bidh do chridhe air chrith ri 
 d' bheb (" If you eat the bird's heart, your heart will 
 palpitate for ever.") 
 
 40
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 there was a mystery. Iain's father was said 
 to be an lona man, but that was only a 
 politeness and a play upon words (" The 
 holy isle of the western sea " could mean 
 either lona or the mystic Hy-Brasil, or Tir- 
 na-thonn of the underworld) ; for he had no 
 mortal father, but a man of the Smiling 
 Distant People was his father. Iain's mother 
 had loved her Leannan-shee, her fairy sweet- 
 heart, but that love is too strong for a woman 
 to bear, and she died. Before Iain was bom 
 she lay under a bush of whitethorn, and her 
 Leannan appeared to her. " I can't give you 
 life," he said, " unless you '11 come away with 
 me." But she would not ; for she wished 
 the child to have Christian baptism. " Well, 
 good-bye," he said, " but you are a weak love. 
 A woman should care more for her lover 
 than her child. But I '11 do this : I '11 give 
 the child the dew, an' he won't die, an' we '11 
 take him away when we want him. An' for 
 a gift to him, you can have either beauty or 
 music." " I don't want the dew," she said, 
 "for I 'd rather he lay below the grass beside 
 me when his time comes : an' as for beauty, 
 it 's been my sorrow. But because I love 
 the songs you have sung to me an' wooed 
 me with, an' made me forget to hide my soul 
 from you — an' it fallen as helpless as a 
 broken wave on damp sand — let the child 
 
 41
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 have the binnbeul and the lamh clarsaireachd 
 (the melodious mouth and the harping 
 hand)." 
 
 And truly enough Iain Macneil " went 
 away." He went back to his own people. 
 It must have been a grief to him not to lie 
 under the grass beside his mother, but it was 
 not for his helping. For days before he 
 mysteriously disappeared he went about 
 making a cincharan like a November wind, 
 a singular plaintive moaning. When asked 
 by his foster-brother Micheil why he was not 
 content, he answered only " Far am bi mo 
 ghaol, bidh mo thathaich " (Where my Love 
 is, there must my returning be). He had 
 for days, said Micheil, the mournful crying 
 in the ear that is so often a presage of death 
 or sorrow ; and himself had said once " Tha 
 'n eabh a' m' chenais" — the cry is in my 
 ear. When he went away, that going was 
 the way of the snow. 
 
 XI 
 
 It is no wonder that legends of Finn and 
 Oisein, of Oscur and Gaul and Diarmuid, of 
 Cuchullin, and many of the old stories of the 
 Gaelic chivalry survive in the isles. There, 
 more than in Ireland, Gaelic has survived as 
 the living speech, and though now in the 
 
 42
 
 THE ISLE OV DREAMS 
 
 Inner Hebrides it is dying before "an a' 
 Beurla," the English tongue, and still more 
 before the degraded " Bheurla leathan " or 
 Glasgow-English of the lowland west, the 
 old vernacular still holds an ancient treasure. 
 The last time I sailed to Staffa from Ulva, 
 a dead calm set in, and we took a man from 
 Gometra to help with an oar — his recom- 
 mendation being that he was " cho liidir ri 
 Cuchullin," as strong as Coohoolin. But 
 neither in lona nor in the northward isles 
 nor in Skye itself, have I found or heard of 
 much concerning the great Gaelic hero. 
 Fionn and Oisin and Diarmid are the names 
 oftenest heard, both in legend and proverbial 
 allusion. An habitual mistake is made by 
 writers who speak of the famous Cuchullin or 
 Cuthullin mountains in Skye as having been 
 named after Cuchullin ; and though some- 
 times the local guides to summer tourists 
 may speak of the Gaelic hero in connection 
 with the mountains north of Coruisk, that is 
 only because of hearsay. The Gaelic name 
 should never be rendered as the Cuthullin 
 or Cohoolin mountains, but as the Coolins. 
 A possible meaning of the name Ctdlfhion 
 (Kyoolyun or Coolun), is "the fine corner," 
 but, as has been suggested, the hills may 
 have got their name because of the " cuillionn 
 mara " or sea-holly, which is pronounced 
 
 43
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Ku' P-unn or coolin. This is most probably 
 the origin of the name. 
 
 In fine weather one may see from lona the 
 Coolins standing out in lovely blue against 
 the northern sky-line, their contours the 
 most beautiful feature in a view of surpassing 
 beauty. How often have I watched them, 
 how often dreamed of what they have seen, 
 since Oisin passed that way with Malvina : 
 since Cuchullin learned the feats of war at 
 Dun Sgaiah, from that great queen whose 
 name, it is said, the island bears in remem- 
 brance of her; since Connlaoch, his son, set 
 sail to meet so tragic a death in Ireland. 
 There are two women of Gaelic antiquity 
 who above all others have always held my 
 imagination as with a spell : Scathach or 
 Sgathaith (sky-ah), the sombre Amazonian 
 queen of the mountain-island (then perhaps, 
 as now, known also as the Isle of Mist), and 
 Meave, the great queen of Connaught, whose 
 name has its mountain bases in gigantic 
 wars, and its summits among the wild poetry 
 and romance of the Shee. 
 
 My earliest knowledge of the heroic cycle 
 of Celtic mythology and history came to me, 
 as a child, when I spent my first summer in 
 Zona. How well I remember a fantastic 
 legend I was told : how that these far blue 
 mountains, so freaked into a savage beauty. 
 
 44
 
 THE ISLE OK DREAMS 
 
 were due to the sword-play of CuchuUin. 
 And this happened because the Queen o' 
 Skye had put a spear through the two breasts 
 of his love, so that he w^ent in among her 
 warrior women and slew every one, and sev- 
 ered the head of Sgaiah herself, and threw 
 it into Coruisk, where to this day it floats 
 as Eilean Dubh, the dark isle. Thereafter, 
 Cuchullin hewed the mountain-tops into 
 great clefts, and trampled the hills into a 
 craggy wilderness, and then rushed into the 
 waves and fought with the sea-hordes till far 
 away the bewildered and terrified stallions 
 of the ocean dashed upon the rocks of Man 
 and uttermost shores of Erin. 
 
 This magnificent mountain range can be 
 seen better still from Lunga near lona, 
 whence it is a short sail with a southerly 
 wind. In I>unga there is a hill called Cnoc 
 Cruit or Dun Cruit, and thence one may see, 
 as in a vast illuminated missal whose pages 
 are of deep blue with bindings of azure and 
 pale gold, innumerable green isles and peaks 
 and hills of the hue of the wild plum. When 
 last I was there it was a day of cloudless 
 June. There was not a sound but the hum 
 of the wild bee foraging in the long garths of 
 white clover, and the continual sighing of a 
 wave. Listening, I thought I heard a harper 
 playing in the hollow of the hill. It may 
 
 45
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 have been the bees heavy with the wine of 
 honey, but I was content with my fancy and 
 fell asleep, and dreamed that a harper came 
 out of the hill, at first so small that he seemed 
 like the green stalk of a lily and had hands 
 like daisies, and then so great that I saw his 
 breath darkening the waves far out on the 
 Hebrid sea. He played, till I saw the stars 
 fall in a ceaseless, dazzling rain upon lona. 
 A wind blew that rain away, and out of the 
 wave that had been lona I saw thousands 
 upon thousands of white doves rise from the 
 foam and fly down the four great highways 
 of the wind. When I woke, there was no 
 one near. lona lay like an emerald under 
 the wild-plum bloom of the Mull mountains. 
 The bees stumbled through the clover; a 
 heron stood silver-grey upon a grey-blue 
 stone ; the continual wave was, as before, as 
 one wave, and with the same hushed sighing. 
 
 XII 
 
 Two or three years ago I heard a boatman 
 use a singular phrase, to the effect that a 
 certain deed was as kindly a thought as that 
 of the piper who played to St. Michei) in his 
 grave. I had never heard of this before, or 
 anything like it, nor have I since, on lip or 
 in book. He told me that he spoke of a 
 wandering piper known as Piobaire Raonull 
 
 46
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Dall, Blind Piper Ronald, who fifty years or 
 so ago used to wander through the isles and 
 West Highlands; and how he never failed 
 to play a spring on his pipes, either to please 
 or to console, or maybe to air a lament for 
 what's lost now and can't come again, when 
 on any holy day he stood before a figure of 
 the Virgin (as he might well do in Barra or 
 South Uist), or by old tombs or habitations 
 of saints. My friend's father or one of his 
 people, once, in the Kyles of Bute, when 
 sailing past the little ruinous graveyard of 
 Kilmichael on the Bute shore, had come 
 upon Raonull-Dall, pacing slowly before 
 the broken stones and the little cell which 
 legend says is both the hermitage and the 
 grave of St. Micheil. When asked what he 
 was playing and what for, in that lonely spot, 
 he said it was an old ancient pibroch, the 
 Gathering of the Clerics, which he was play- 
 ing just to cheer the heart of the good man 
 down below. When told that St. Micheil 
 would be having his fill of good music 
 where he was, the old man came away in the 
 boat, and for long sat silent and strangely 
 disheartened. I have more than once since 
 then sailed to that little lonely ancient grave 
 of Kilmichael in the Kyles of Bute, from 
 Tignabruaich or further Cantyre, and have 
 wished that I too could play a spring upon 
 
 47
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 the pipes, for if so I would play to the kind 
 heart of " Piobaire Raonull Dall." 
 
 Of all the saints of the west, from St. 
 Molios or Molossius (Maol-Iosa ? the servant 
 of Jesus ?) who has left his nanae in the 
 chief township in Arran, to St. Barr, who 
 has given his to the largest of the Bishop's 
 Isles, as the great Barra island-chain in the 
 South Hebrides used to be called, there is 
 none so commonly remembered and so fre- 
 (juently invoked as St. Micheil. There used 
 to be no festival in the Western Isles so 
 popular as that held on 29th September, " La' 
 Fheill Mhicheil," the Day of the Festival of 
 Michael ; and the Eve of Michael's Day is 
 still in a few places one of the gayest nights 
 in the year, though no longer is every barn 
 turned into a dancing place or a place of 
 merry-making or, at least, a place for lovers 
 to meet and give betrothal gifts. The day 
 itself, in the Catholic Isles, was begun with 
 a special Mass, and from hour to hour was 
 filled with traditional duties and pleasures. 
 
 The whole of the St. Micheil ceremonies 
 were of a remote origin, and some, as the 
 ancient and almost inexplicable dances, and 
 their archaic accompaniment of word and 
 gesture, far older than the sacrificial slaying 
 of the Michaelmas Lamb. It is, however, 
 not improbable that this latter rite was a 
 
 48
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 survival of a pagan custom long anterior to 
 the substitution of the Christian for the 
 Druidic faith. 
 
 The " lollach Mhicheil " — the triumphal 
 song of Michael — is quite as much pagan as 
 Christian. We have here, indeed, one of the 
 most interesting and convincing instances of 
 the transmutation of a personal symbol. St. 
 Michael is on the surface a saint of extraor- 
 dinary powers and the patron of the shores 
 and the shore-folk : deeper, he is an angel, 
 who is upon the sea what the angelican saint, 
 St. George, is upon the land: deeper, he is, 
 a blending of the Roman Neptune and the 
 Greek Poseidon : deeper, he is himself an 
 ancient Celtic god : deeper, he is no other 
 than Manannan, the god of ocean and all 
 ■waters, in the Gaelic Pantheon : as, once 
 more, Manannan himself is dimly revealed to 
 us as still more ancient, more primitive, and 
 even as supreme in remote godhead, the 
 Father of an immortal Clan. 
 
 To this day Micheil is sometimes alluded 
 to as the god Micheil, and I have seen some 
 ver)' strange Gaelic lines which run in effect : 
 " It was well thou hadst the horse of the god Micheil 
 Who goes without a bit in his mouth, 
 So that thou couldst ride him through the fields of the 
 
 air, 
 And with him leap over the knowledge of Nature " — 
 presumably not very ancient as they stand. 
 
 49
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 because of the use of " steud " for horse, and 
 "naduir" for nature, obvious adaptations 
 from EngUsh and Latin. Certainly St. 
 Micheil has left his name in many places, 
 from the shores of the Hebrides to the 
 famous Mont St. Michel of Brittany, and I 
 doubt not that everywhere an earlier folk, at 
 the same places, called him Manannan. In 
 a most unlikely place to find a record of old 
 hymns and folk-songs, one of the volumes of 
 Reports of the Highlands and Islands Com- 
 mission, Mr. Carmichael many years ago 
 contributed some of his unequalled store 
 of Hebridean reminiscence and knowledge. 
 Among these old things saved, there is none 
 that is better worth saving than the beauti- 
 ful Catholic hymn or invocation sung at the 
 time of the midsummer migration to the hill- 
 pastures. In this shealing-hymn the three 
 powers who are invoked are St. Micheil (for 
 he is a patron saint of horses and travel, 
 as well as of the sea and seafarers), St. 
 Columba, guardian of cattle, and the Virgin 
 Mary, " Mathair Uain ghil," " Mother of the 
 White Lamb," as the tender Gaelic has it, 
 who is so beautifully called the golden-haired 
 Virgin Shepherdess. 
 
 This is a far cry from lona I And I had 
 meant to write only of how I heard so 
 recently as three or four summers ago a 
 
 50
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 verse of the Uist Herding Chant. It was 
 recited to me, overagainst DunI, by a friend 
 who is a crofter in that part of lona. It 
 was not quite as Mr. Carmichael translates 
 it, but near enough. The Rann Buachhail- 
 leag is, I should add, addressed to the cattle. 
 
 " The protection of God and Columba 
 
 Encompass your going and coming, 
 
 And about you be the milkmaid of the smooth 
 
 white palms, 
 Bridget of the clustering hair, golden brown." 
 
 On lona, however, there is, so far as I 
 remember, no special spot sacred to St. 
 Micheil : but there is a legend that on the 
 night Columba died Micheil came over the 
 waves on a rippling flood of light, which was 
 a cloud of angelic wings, and that he sang a 
 hymn to the soul of the saint before it took 
 flight for its heavenly fatherland. No one 
 heard that hymn save Colum, but I think 
 that he who first spoke of it remembered a 
 more ancient legend of how Manannan came 
 to Cuchullin when he was in the country of 
 the Shee, when Liban laughed. 
 
 XIII 
 
 I spoke of Port-a-Churaich, the Ilaven of 
 the Coracle, a little ago. How strange a 
 history is that of lona since the coming of 
 the Irish priest, Crimthan, or Crimmon as 
 
 51
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 we call the name, surnamed Colum Cille, the 
 Dove of the Church. Perhaps its unwritten 
 history is not less strange. God was revered 
 on lona by priests of a forgotten faith before 
 the Cross was raised. The sun-priest and 
 the moon-worshipper had their revelation 
 here. I do not think their offerings were 
 despised. Colum, who loved the Trinity so 
 well that on one occasion he subsisted for 
 three days on the mystery of the mere word, 
 did not forego the luxury of human sacrifice, 
 though he abhorred the blood stained altar. 
 For, to him, an obstinate pagan slain was to 
 the glory of God. The moon-worshipper 
 did no worse when he led the chosen victim 
 to the dolmen. But the moon-worshipper 
 was a Pict without the marvel of the written 
 word; so he remained a heathen, and the 
 Christian named himself saint or martyr. 
 
 None knows with surety who dwelled on 
 this mysterious island before the famous son 
 of Feilim of Clan Domnhuil, great-grandson 
 of Neil of the Nine Hostages, came with his 
 fellow-monks and raised the Cross among 
 the wondering Picts. But the furthest record 
 tells of worship. Legend itself is more 
 ancient here than elsewhere. Once a woman 
 was worshipped. Some say she was the 
 moon, but this was before the dim day of 
 the moon-worshippers. (In Gaelic too, as 
 
 52
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 with all the Celtic peoples, it is not the 
 moon but the sun that is feminine.) She 
 may have been an ancestral Brighde, or that 
 mysterious Anait whose Scythian name sur- 
 vives elsewhere in the Gaelic west, and 
 nothing else of all her ancient glory but that 
 shadowy word. Perhaps, here, the Celts 
 remembered one whom they had heard of in 
 Asian valleys or by the waters of Nilus, and 
 called upon Isis under a new name. 
 
 The Haven of the Coracle ! It was not 
 Colum and his white-robe company who first 
 made the isle sacred. I have heard that 
 when Mary Macleod (our best-loved Hebri- 
 dean poet) was asked what she thought of 
 lona, she replied that she thought it was the 
 one bit of Eden that had not been destroyed, 
 and that it was none other than the central 
 isle in the Garden untouched of Eve or 
 Adam, where the angels waited. 
 
 Many others have dreamed by that lonely 
 cairn of the Irish king, before Colum, and, 
 doubtless, many since the child who sought 
 the Divine Forges. 
 
 XIV 
 
 Years afterwards I wrote, in the same 
 place, after an absence wherein lona had 
 become as a dream to me, the story of St. 
 Bridget, in the Hebrides called Bride, under 
 
 S3
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 the love-name commonly given her, Muime 
 Chriosd — Christ's Foster-Mother. May I 
 quote again, here, as so apposite to what 
 I have written, to what indirectly I am try- 
 ing to convey of the spiritual history of lona, 
 some portion of it ? 
 
 In my legendary story I tell of how one 
 called Uiighall, of a kingly line, sailing from 
 Ireland, came to be cast upon the ocean-shore 
 of lona, then called Innis-nan-Dhruidhneach, 
 the Isle of the Druids — for this was before 
 the cry of the Sacred Wolf was heard, as an 
 old-time island poet has it, playing upon 
 Colum's house-name, Crimthan, signifying a 
 wolf. The frail coracle in which he and 
 others had crossed the Moyle had been 
 driven before a tempest, and cast at sunrise 
 like a spent fish upon the rocks of the little 
 haven that is now called Port-aChuraich. 
 All had found death in the wave except him- 
 self and the little girl-child he had brought 
 with him from Ireland, the child of so much 
 magic mystery. 
 
 When, warmed by the sun, they rose, they 
 found themselves in a waste place. Dughall 
 was ill in his mind because of the portents, 
 and now to his fear and amaze the child 
 Bridget knelt on the stones, and, with claspt 
 hands, frail and pink as the sea-shells round 
 about her, sang a song of words which were 
 
 54
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 unknown to him. This was the more mar- 
 vellous, as she was yet but an infant, and 
 could say few words even of Erse, the only 
 tongue she had heard. 
 
 At this portent, he knew that Aodh the 
 Ard-Druid had spoken seeingly. Truly this 
 child was not of human parentage. So he, 
 too, kneeled; and, bowing before her, asked 
 if she were of the race of the Tuatha de 
 Danann, or of the older gods, and what her 
 will was, that he might be her servant. Then 
 it was that the kneeling child looked at him, 
 and sang in a low sweet voice in Erse : 
 
 " I am but a little child, 
 Diighall, son of Hugh, son of Art, 
 But ■my garment shall be laid 
 On the lord of the world, 
 Yea, surely it shall be that He, 
 Tlie King of Elements Himself 
 Shall lean against my bosom, 
 And I will give him peace. 
 And peace will I give to all who ask 
 Because of this mighty Prince, 
 And because of his Mother that is the 
 Daughter of Peace." 
 
 And while Diighall Donn was still marvel- 
 ling at this thing, the Arch-Druid of lona 
 approached, with his white-robed priests. 
 A grave welcome was given to the stranger. 
 While the youngest of the servants of God 
 was entrusted with the child, the Arch-Druid 
 
 55
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 took Dughall aside and questioned him. It 
 was not till the third day that the old man 
 gave his decision. Dughall Donn was to 
 abide on lona if he so willed; but the child 
 was to stay. His life would be spared, nor 
 would he be a bondager of any kind, and a 
 little land to till would be given him, and all 
 that he might need. But of his past he was 
 to say no word. His name was to become 
 as nought, and he was to be known simply as 
 Duvach. The child, too, was to be named 
 Bride, for that was the way the name Bridget 
 is called in the Erse of the Isles. 
 
 To the question of Dughall, that was 
 thenceforth Duvach, as to why he laid so 
 great stress on the child, who was a girl, and 
 the reputed offspring of shame at that, 
 Cathal the Arch-Druid replied thus : " My 
 kinsman Aodh of the golden hair, who sent 
 you here, was wiser than Hugh the king, 
 and all the Druids of Aoimag. Truly, this 
 child is an Immortal. There is an ancient 
 prophecy concerning her: surely of her who 
 is now here, and no other. There shall be, 
 it says, a spotless maid bom of a virgin of 
 the ancient divine race in Innisfail. And 
 when for the seventh time the sacred year 
 has come, she will hold Eternity in her lap 
 as a white flower. Her maiden breasts shall 
 swell with milk for the Prince of the World. 
 
 56
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 She shall give suck to the King of the 
 Elements. So I say unto you, Uuvach, go 
 in peace. Take unto yourself a wife, and 
 live upon the place I will allot on the east 
 side of lona. Treat Bride as though she 
 were your soul, and leave her much alone, 
 and let her learn of the sun and the wind. 
 In the fulness of time the prophecy shall be 
 fulfilled." 
 
 So was it, from that day of the days. 
 Duvach took a wife unto himself, who 
 weaned the little Bride, who grew in beauty 
 and grace, so that all men marvelled. Year 
 by year for seven years the wife of Duvach 
 bore him a son, and these grew apace in 
 strength, so that by the beginning of the 
 third year of the seventh circle of Bride's 
 life there were three stalwart youths to 
 brother her, and three comely and strong 
 lads, and one young boy fair to see. Nor 
 did any one, not even Bride herself, saving 
 Cathal the Arch-Druid, know that Duvach 
 the herdsman was Dughall Donn, of a 
 princely race in Innisfail. 
 
 In the end, too, Duvach came to think 
 that he had dreamed, or at the least that 
 Cathal had not interpreted the prophecy 
 aright. For though Bride was of exceeding 
 beauty, and of a holiness that made the 
 young druids bow before her as though she 
 
 57
 
 THK ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 were a bindia, yet the world went on as 
 before, and the days brought no change. 
 Often, while she was still a child, he had 
 questioned her about the words she had said 
 as a babe, but she had no memory of them. 
 Once, in her ninth year, he came upon her 
 on the hillside of Dun-I singing these self- 
 same words. Her eyes dreamed far away. 
 He bowed his head, and, praying to the 
 Giver of Light, hurried to Cathal. The old 
 man bade him speak no more to the child 
 concerning the mysteries. 
 
 Bride lived the hours of her days upon the 
 slopes of Dun-I, herding the sheep, or in 
 following the kye upon the green hillocks 
 and grassy dunes of what then, as now, was 
 called the Machar. The beauty of the world 
 was her daily food. The spirit within her 
 was like sunlight behind a white flower. 
 The birdeens in the green bushes sang for 
 joy when they saw her blue eyes. The 
 tender prayers that were in her heart were 
 often seen flying above her head in the form 
 of white doves of sunshine. 
 
 But when the middle of the year came that 
 was (though Duvach had forgotten it) the 
 year of the prophecy, his eldest son, Conn, 
 who was now a man, murmured against the 
 virginity of Bride, because of her beauty and 
 because a chieftain of the mainland was 
 
 58
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 eager to wed her. " I shall wed Bride or 
 raid lona," was the message he had sent. 
 
 So one day, before the Great Fire of the 
 summer festival, Conn and his brothers 
 reproached Bride. 
 
 " Idle are these pure eyes, O Bride, not to 
 be as lamps at thy marriage-bed." 
 
 " Truly, it is not by the eyes that we live," 
 replied the maiden gently, while to their fear 
 and amazement she passed her hand before 
 her face and let them see that the sockets 
 were empty. 
 
 Trembling with awe at this portent, Diivach 
 intervened : 
 
 " By the sun I swear it, O Bride, that thou 
 shalt marry whomsoever thou wilt and none 
 other, and when thou wilt, or not at all, if 
 such be thy will." 
 
 And when he had spoken. Bride smiled, and 
 passed her hand before her face again, and all 
 there were abashed because of the blue light 
 as of morning that was in her shining eyes. 
 
 It was while the dew was yet wet on the 
 grass that on the morrow Bride came out of 
 her father's house, and went up the steep 
 slope of Dfln-I. The crying of the ewes 
 and lambs at the pastures came plaintively 
 against the dawn. The lowing of the kye 
 arose from the sandy hollows by the shore, 
 or from the meadows on the lower slopes. 
 
 59
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Through the whole island went a rapid, 
 trickling sound, most sweet to hear : the 
 myriad voices of twittering birds, from the 
 dotterel in the seaweed, to the larks climbing 
 the blue slopes of heaven. 
 
 This was the festival of her birth, and she 
 was clad in white. About her waist was a 
 girdle of the sacred rowan, the feathery green 
 leaves flickering dusky shadows upon her 
 robe as she moved. The light upon her 
 yellow hair was as when morning wakes, 
 laughing in wind amid the tall com. As she 
 went she sang to herself, softly as the 
 crooning of a dove. If any had been there 
 to hear he would have been abashed, for the 
 words were not in Erse, and the eyes of 
 the beautiful girl were as those of one in a 
 vision. 
 
 When, at last, a brief while before sunrise, 
 she reached the summit of the Scuir, that is 
 so small a hill and yet seems so big in lona, 
 where it is the sole peak, she found three 
 young druids there, ready to tend the sacred 
 fire the moment the sunrays should kindle it. 
 Each was clad in a white robe, with fillets 
 of oak leaves ; and each had a golden 
 armlet. They made a quiet obeisance as 
 she approached. One stepped forward, with 
 a flush in his face because of her beauty, 
 that was as a sea-wave for grace and a flower 
 
 60
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 for purity, as sunlight for joy and moonlight 
 for peace. 
 
 "Thou mayst draw near if thou wilt, 
 Bride, daughter of Duvach," he said, with 
 something of reverence as well as of grave 
 courtesy in his voice ; " for the holy Cathal 
 hath said that the breath of the Source of 
 All is upon thee. It is not lawful for women 
 to be here at this moment, but thou hast the 
 law shining upon thy face and in thine eyes. 
 Hast thou come to pray ? " 
 
 But at that moment a cry came from one 
 of his companions. He turned, and rejoined 
 his fellows. Then all three sank upon their 
 knees, and with outstretched arms hailed the 
 rising of God. 
 
 As the sun rose, a solemn chant swelled 
 from their lips, ascending as incense through 
 the silent air. The glory of the new day 
 came soundlessly. Peace was in the blue 
 heaven, on the blue-green sea, and on the 
 green land. There was no wind, even where 
 the currents of the deep moved in shadowy 
 purple. The sea itself was silent, making no 
 more than a sighing slumber-breath round 
 the white sands of the isle, or a dull whisper 
 where the tide lifted the long weed that 
 clung to the rocks. 
 
 In what strange, mysterious way. Bride did 
 not see ; but as the three druids held their 
 
 6i
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 hands before the sacred fire there was a faint 
 crackling, then three thin spirals of blue 
 smoke rose, and soon dusky red and wan 
 yellow tongues of flame moved to and fro. 
 The sacrifice of God was made. Out of the 
 immeasurable heaven He had come, in his 
 golden chariot. Now, in the wonder and 
 mystery of His love, He was re-born upon 
 the world, re-bom a little fugitive flame 
 upon a low hill in a remote isle. Great must 
 be His love that he could die thus daily in a 
 thousand places : so great His love that he 
 could give up His own body to daily death, 
 and suffer the holy flame that was in the 
 embers He illumined to be lighted and 
 revered and then scattered to the four 
 quarters of the world. 
 
 Bride could bear no longer the mystery of 
 this great love. It moved her to an ecstasy. 
 What tenderness of divine love that could 
 thus redeem the world daily : what long- 
 suffering for all the evil and cruelty done 
 hourly upon the weeping earth : what patience 
 with the bitterness of the blind fates I The 
 beauty of the worship of Be'al was upon her 
 as a golden glory. Her heart leaped to a 
 song that could not be sung. 
 
 Bowing her head, so that the tears fell 
 upon her hands, she rose and moved 
 away. 
 
 62
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 XV 
 
 Elsewhere I have told how a good man of 
 lona sailed along the coast one Sabbath 
 afternoon with the Holy Book, and put the 
 Word upon the seals of Soa : and, in another 
 tale, how a lonely man fought with a sea- 
 woman, that was a seal; as, again, how 
 two fishermen strove with the sea-witch of 
 Earraid : and, in " The Dan-nan-Ron," of a 
 man who went mad with the sea-madness, 
 because of the seal-blood that was in his 
 veins, he being a MacOdrum of Uist, and 
 one of the Sliochd nan Ron, the Tribe of the 
 Seal. And those who have read the tale, 
 twice printed, once as " The Annir Choille," 
 and again as " Cathal of the Woods," will 
 remember how, at the end, the good hermit 
 Molios, when near death in his sea-cave of 
 Arran, called the seals to come out of the 
 wave and listen to him, so that he might tell 
 them the white story of Christ ; and how in 
 the moonshine, with the flowing tide stealing 
 from his feet to his knees, the old saint 
 preached the gospel of love, while the seals 
 crouched upon the rocks, with their brown 
 eyes filled with glad tears : and how, before 
 his death at dawn, he was comforted by 
 hearing them splashing to and fro in the 
 moon-dazzle, and calling one to the other, 
 " We, too, are of the sons of God." 
 
 63
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 What has so often been written about is a 
 reflection of what is in the mind : and though 
 stories of the seals may be heard from the 
 Rhinns of Islay to the Seven Hunters (and I 
 first heard that of the MacOdrums, the seal- 
 folk, from a Uist man), I think that it was 
 because of what I heard of the sea-people 
 on lona, when I was a child, that they have 
 been so much with me in remembrance. 
 
 In the short tale of the Moon-child, I told 
 how two seals that had been wronged by a 
 curse which had been put upon them by 
 Columba, forgave the saint, and gave him a 
 sore-won peace. I recall another (unpub- 
 lished) tale, where a seal called Domnhuil 
 Dhu — a name of evil omen — was heard 
 laughing one Hallowe'en on the rocks below 
 the ruined abbey, and calling to the crea- 
 tures of the sea that God was dead : and 
 how the man who heard him laughed, and 
 was therewith stricken with paralysis, and so 
 fell sidelong from the rocks into the deep 
 wave, and was afterwards found beaten as 
 with hammers and shredded as with sharp 
 fangs. 
 
 But, as most characteristic, I would rather 
 tell here the story of Black Angus, though 
 the longer tale of which it forms a part has 
 been printed before. 
 
 One night, a dark rainy night it was, with 
 
 64
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 an uplift wind battering as with the palms of 
 savage hands the heavy clouds that hid the 
 moon, I went to the cottage near Spanish 
 Port, where my friend Ivor Maclean lived 
 with his old deaf mother. He had reluct- 
 antly promised to tell me the legend of Black 
 Angus, a request he had ignored in a sullen 
 silence when he and Padruic Macrae and I 
 were on the Sound that day. No tales of 
 the kind should be told upon the water. 
 
 When I entered, he was sitting before the 
 flaming coal-fire ; for on lona now, by decree 
 of MacCailein Mor, there is no more peat 
 burned. 
 
 "You will tell me now, Ivor?" was all I 
 said. 
 
 " Yes ; I will be telling you now. And the 
 reason why I did not tell you before was 
 because it is not a wise or a good thing to 
 tell ancient stories about the sea while still 
 on the running wave. Macrae should not 
 have done that thing. It may be we shall 
 suffer for it when next we go out with the 
 nets. We were to go to-night ; but no, not 
 I, no, no, for sure, not for all the herring in 
 the Sound." 
 
 " Is it an ancient sgetd, Ivor ? " 
 
 " Ay. I am not for knowing the age of 
 these things. It may be as old as the days 
 of the Feinn, for all I know. It has come 
 
 65
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 down to US. Alasdair MacAlasdair of Tiree, 
 him that used to boast of having all the 
 stories of Colum and Brigdhe, it was he told 
 it to the mother of my mother, and she to 
 me." 
 
 " What is it called ? " 
 
 " Well, this and that ; but there is no 
 harm in saying it is called the Dark Name- 
 less One." 
 
 " The Dark Nameless One ! " 
 
 " It is this way. But will you ever have 
 heard of the MacOdrums of Uist ? " 
 
 "Ay; the Sliochd-nan-r6n." 
 
 "That is so. God knows. The Sliochd- 
 nan-r6n . . . the progeny of the Seal. . . . 
 Well, well, no man knows what moves in the 
 shadow of life. And now I will be telling 
 you that old ancient tale, as it was given to 
 me by the mother of my mother." 
 
 XVI 
 
 On a day of the days, Colum 
 
 was walking alone by the sea-shore. The 
 monks were at the hoe or the spade, and 
 some milking the kye, and some at the fish- 
 ing. They say it was on the first day of 
 the Faoilleack Geamhraid/t, the day that is 
 called Am Fheill Brighde, and that they call 
 Candlemas over yonder. 
 
 66
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 The holy man had wandered on to where 
 the rocks are, opposite to Soa. He was 
 praying and praying ; and it is said that 
 whenever he prayed aloud, the barren egg in 
 the nest would quicken, and the blighted bud 
 unfold, and the butterfly break its shroud. 
 
 Of a sudden he came upon a great black 
 seal, lying silent on the rocks, with wicked 
 eyes. 
 
 " My blessing upon you, O Rin," he said, 
 with the good kind courteousness that was 
 his. " Droch spadadk ort" answered the seal, 
 " A bad end to you, Colum of the Gown." 
 
 " Sure now," said Colum angrily, " I am 
 knowing by that curse that you are no friend 
 of Christ, but of the evil pagan faith out of 
 the north. For here I am known ever as 
 Colum the White, or as Colum the Saint; 
 and it is only the Picts and the wanton Nor- 
 men who deride me because of the holy 
 white robe I wear." 
 
 " Well, well," replied the seal, speaking 
 the good Gaelic as though it were the tongue 
 of the deep sea, as God knows it may be for 
 all you, I, or the blind wind can say; "well, 
 well, let that thing be : it 's a wave-way here 
 or a wave-way there. But now, if it is a 
 druid you are, whether of fire or of Christ, 
 be telling me where my woman is, and where 
 my little daughter." 
 
 67
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 At this, Colum looked at him for a long 
 while. Then he knew. 
 
 " It is a man you were once, O R6n ?" 
 
 " Maybe ay and maybe no." 
 
 " And with that thick Gaelic that you have, 
 it will be out of the north isles you come ? " 
 
 " That is a true thing." 
 
 " Now I am for knowing at last who and 
 what you are. You are one of the race of 
 Odrum the Pagan ? " 
 
 " Well, I am not denying it, Colum. And 
 what is more, I am Angus MacOdrum, Aon- 
 ghas mac Torcall mhic Odrum, and the name 
 I am known by is Black Angus." 
 
 "A fitting name too," said Colum the 
 Holy, "because of the black sin in your 
 heart, and the black end God has in store 
 for you." 
 
 At that Black Angus laughed. 
 
 " Why is laughter upon you, Man-Seal ?" 
 
 " W^ell, it is because of the good company 
 I '11 be having. But, now, give me the word : 
 Are you for having seen or heard of a woman 
 called Kirsteen Mc.Vurich ? " 
 
 " Kirsteen — Kirsteen — that is the good 
 name of a nun it is, and no sea-wanton 1 " 
 
 " Oh, a name here or a name there is soft 
 sand. And so you cannot be for telling me 
 where my woman is ? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 68
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 "Then a stake for your belly, and nails 
 through your hands, thirst on your tongue, 
 and the corbies at your eyne ! " 
 
 And, with that, Black Angus louped into 
 the green water, and the hoarse wild laugh 
 of him sprang into the air and fell dead upon 
 the shore like a wind-spent mew. 
 
 Colum went slowly back to the brethren, 
 brooding deep. " God is good," he said in 
 a low voice, again and again ; and each time 
 that he spoke there came a daisy into the 
 grass, or a bird rose, with song to it for 
 the first time, wonderful and sweet to hear. 
 
 As he drew near to the House of God he 
 met Murtagh, an old monk of the ancient 
 race of the isles. 
 
 " Who is Kirsteen Mc.Vurich, Murtagh ? " 
 he asked. 
 
 " She was a good servant of Christ, she 
 was, in the south isles, O Colum, till Black 
 Angus won her to the sea." 
 
 " And when was that ? " 
 
 " Nigh upon a thousand years ago." 
 
 " But can mortal sin live as long as that ? " 
 
 " Ay, it endureth. Long, long ago, before 
 Oisln sang, before Fionn, before Cuchullin 
 was a glorious great prince, and in the days 
 when the Tuatha-de-Danann were sole lords 
 in all green Banba, Black Angus made the 
 woman Kirsteen Mc.Vurich leave the place 
 
 69
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 of prayer and go down to the sea-shore, and 
 there he leaped upon her and made her his 
 prey, and she followed him into the sea." 
 
 " And is death above her now ? " 
 
 " No. She is the woman that weaves the 
 sea-spells at the wild place out yonder that 
 is known as Earraid : she that is called the 
 sea-witch." 
 
 " Then why was Black Angus for the 
 seeking her here and the seeking her there ? " 
 
 " It is the Doom. It is Adam's first wife 
 she is, that sea-witch over there, where the 
 foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks." 
 
 " And who will he be ? " 
 
 " His body is the body of Angus, the son 
 of Torcall of the race of Odrum, for all that 
 a seal he is to the seeming; but the soul of 
 him is Judas." 
 
 " Black Judas, Murtagh ? " 
 
 "Ay, Black Judas, Colum." 
 
 But with that, Ivor Macrae rose abruptly 
 from before the fire, saying that he would 
 speak no more that night. And truly enough 
 there was a wild, lone, desolate cry in the 
 wind, and a slapping of the waves one upon 
 the other with an eerie laughing sound, and 
 the screaming of a seamew that was like a 
 human thing. 
 
 70
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 So I touched the shawl of his mother, who 
 looked up with startled eyes and said, " God 
 be with us ; " and then I opened the door, 
 and the salt smell of the wrack was in my 
 nostrils, and the great drow'ning blackness 
 of the night. 
 
 XVII 
 
 One day in an early year, that was certainly 
 not later than my ninth, I had on lona a 
 singular instance of what is called second- 
 sight, though indirectly, for only the narration 
 of it came to me, and that some time after 
 the occurrences related. On a late autumn 
 afternoon the Oban steamer coming from 
 Tiree put in at the haven, but only one 
 passenger alighted in the ferry-boat, Mac- 
 Donald, the then ferryman, noticed that 
 the stranger was a poor man and that the 
 little luggage he had was done up in a red 
 bandana handkerchief. He tried the man 
 in the Gaelic, but got no answer, and that 
 surprised him, for he was certain he had 
 heard the mate of the steamer, or if not the 
 mate some other, speak to the man in Gaelic 
 just before he came over the side of the 
 vessel, and that he had answered in the old 
 speech. Then MacDonald spoke in English, 
 and asked him if he had been on the island 
 before. 
 
 71
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 " No," he said, " and I hope never to see 
 it or Scotland again. I am from New 
 Zealand," he added, "and in a week from 
 now I '11 be on the ship that will be taking 
 me there." 
 
 When the ferrj'-boat came to the little 
 stone pier the stranger asked the way to the 
 house where Mary Macallum lived. i 
 
 " What Mary Macallum ? " asked Mac- 
 Donald. 
 
 " This Mary Macallum," said the stranger, 
 showing a tinted photograph on a porcelain 
 medallion. MacDonald recognised the face 
 at once, and directed the man to the farm- 
 house where a single-woman of that name 
 lived since her father and mother had left 
 her their all. When the man stood in the 
 doorway, the woman, who was peeling pota- 
 toes, gave a cry, and went yellow-white as 
 clotted foam. 
 
 " Is Seumas (James) dead ? " she cried in 
 Gaelic. 
 
 " That is so," said the man in Gaelic too, 
 "and by the same token I've brought you 
 this. And before he died James Macarthur 
 said to me, take this to Mary Macallum on 
 Zona, and say to her that if I thought she 'd 
 
 I The name is at random. I do not recollect the 
 actual name. And so again with Neil Stewart. 
 
 72
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 have you instead then it 's dying happy I 
 should be." 
 
 The woman looked at him, like as though 
 dazed. 
 
 " What is it," he said, "what is the matter 
 with you, woman ? " 
 
 Then the dream went out of her eyes, and 
 her white face grew like a rock for hardness, 
 but a rock on fire. 
 
 " And what will your name be ? " she 
 asked. 
 
 "Neil Stewart," he said: "Neil Stewart, 
 out of Appin in Argyll." 
 
 " And do you know what I see behind 
 you, Neil Stewart ? " 
 
 The man gave a start, and looked behind 
 him. 
 
 " And what will that be ? " he asked 
 uneasily. 
 
 " It 's a dream I 've had three times, an' I 
 see it all over again as I look at you, Neil 
 Stewart. I see a field of the dead and 
 wounded, with a few men on horses, riding 
 away, and others, further off, looking about 
 them. And broken guns. And among the 
 dead and wounded in the sand, for it is all 
 sand there, I see dark-skinned men too, but 
 they are all dead. And at that fall of sand 
 yonder, a few yards from the upside-down gun 
 sticking in the sand I see Seumas Macarthur 
 
 73
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 lying faint to death, but struggling hard to 
 get the water-bottle from out below his 
 broken arm. And what do I see next, Neil 
 Stewart . . . ah, you needn't be so white 
 and scared, I 'm only a woman ye ken, Neil 
 Stewart out of Appin in Argyll ! . . . what 
 do I see next ? I see a man that looks singu- 
 lar like Neil Stewart out of Appin in Argyll 
 crawling towards my man, an' snatchin' the 
 water-bottle from him an' drinkin' every drop 
 left in it, an' then striking my man on the 
 head with it, an' then feeling in his pock- 
 ets, and taking out of the one the little sil- 
 ver there is an' some strange coins, and 
 from the other a letter, an' this portrait 
 here tied by a red string through the top 
 buttonhole of his flannel shirt. And now, 
 
 Neil Stewart out of Appin in Argyll, I 
 
 But at that the man gave a skreich like a 
 herring-gull, and his face grew dark and foam 
 blew from his mouth and he fell forward in 
 a swoon of death. And true enough he died 
 of an apoplexy there and then. And it was 
 all true, every word of it. For when less 
 than a month later James Macarthur came 
 back to lona to seek out Mary Macallum, 
 for all he had but one arm now after that 
 fierce fight at dawn in the sands of Egypt, he 
 bore out every word that Mary had uttered, 
 she with her dreams behind her and her 
 
 74
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 vision before her, when the man Stewart 
 stood before her like a dread phantom of 
 sleep. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 For one thing of great Gaelic import, 
 Columba has been given a singular preemi- 
 nence — not for his love of country, pride of 
 race, passionate loyalty to his clan, to every 
 blood-claim and foster-claim, and friendship- 
 claim, though in all this he was the very 
 archetype of the clannish Gael — but because 
 (so it is averred) he was the first of our 
 race of whom is recorded the systematic use 
 of this strange gift of spiritual foresight, 
 "second-sight." It has been stated authori- 
 tatively that he is the first of whom there is 
 record as having possessed this faculty ; but 
 that could only be averred by one ignorant 
 of ancient Gaelic literature. Even in Adam- 
 nan's chronicle, written some seventy years 
 after the death of Columba, there is record 
 of others having this faculty, apart from the 
 perhaps more purely spiritual vision of his 
 mother Aithne, when an angel raimented her 
 with the beauty of her unborn son, or of his 
 foster-father, the priest Cruithnechan, who 
 saw the singular light of the soul about his 
 sleeping pupil, or of the abbot Brendan who 
 redeemed the saint from excommunication 
 
 75
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 and perhaps death by his vision of him 
 advancing with a pillar of fire before him and 
 an angel on either side. (When, long years 
 afterwards, Brendan died in Ireland, Colum 
 in lona startled his monks by calling for 
 an immediate celebration of the Eucharist, 
 because it had been revealed to him that St. 
 Brendan had gone to the heavenly fatherland 
 yesternight : " Angels came to meet his soul : 
 I saw the whole earth illumined with their 
 glory.") Among others there is the story of 
 Abbot Kenneth, who, sitting at supper, rose 
 so suddenly as to leave without his sandals, 
 and at the altar of his church prayed for 
 Colum, at that moment in dire peril upon 
 the sea : the story of Ernan, who, fishing in 
 the river Fenda, saw the death of Colum in a 
 symbol of flame : the story of Lugh mac 
 Tailchan, who, at Cloinfinchoi!, beheld lona 
 (which he had never visited), and above it 
 a blaze of angels' wings, and Colum's soul. 
 In the most ancient tales there is frequent 
 allusion to what we call second-sight. The 
 writer alluded to could not have heard 
 of the warning of the dread Mor-Rigan to 
 Cuchulain before the fatal strife of the Tain- 
 B6-Cuailgne; or Cuchulain's own pre-vision 
 (among a score as striking) of the hostings and 
 gatherings on the fatal plain of Muirthemne ; 
 or the Amazonian queen, Scathach's, fore- 
 
 76
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 knowledge of the career and early death of 
 the champion of the Gaels : 
 
 " (At the last) great peril awaits thee . . . 
 Alone against a vast herd : 
 Thirty years I reckon the length of thy years 
 
 (literally, the strength of thy valour) ; 
 Further than this I do not add ; " 
 
 or of Deirdre's second-sight, when by the 
 white cairn on Sliav Fuad she saw the sons 
 of Usna headless, and lllann the Fair head- 
 less too, but Buimne the Ruthless Red with 
 his head upon his shoulders, smiling a grim 
 smile — when she saw over Naois, her be- 
 loved, a cloud of blood — or that, alas, too 
 bitter-true a foreseeing, when in the Craebh 
 Derg, the House of the Red Branch, she 
 cried to her lover and his two brothers that 
 death was at the door and "grievous to me 
 is the deed, O darling friends — and till the 
 world's end Emain will not be better for a 
 single night than it is to-night." Or, again, 
 of that pathetic, simultaneous death-vision 
 of Baile the Sweet-Spoken and Aillinn, he in 
 the north, she in the south, so that each out 
 of a grief unbearable straightway died, as 
 told in one of the oldest as well as loveliest 
 of ancient Gaelic tales, the Scil Baili Binn- 
 berlaig. 
 
 There is something strangely beautiful in 
 
 77
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 most of these " second-sight " stories of 
 Columba. The faculty itself is so apt to the 
 spiritual law that one wonders why it is so 
 set apart in doubt. It would, I think, be far 
 stranger if there were no such faculty. 
 
 That I believe, it were needless to say, 
 were it not that these words may be read by 
 many to whom this quickened inward vision 
 is a superstition, or a fantastic glorification 
 of insight. I believe ; not only because there 
 is nothing too strange for the soul, whose 
 vision surely I will not deny, while I accept 
 what is lesser, the mind's prescience, and, what 
 is least, the testimony of the eyes. That I 
 have cause to believe is perhaps too personal 
 a statement, and is of little account; but in 
 that interior wisdom, which is no longer the 
 flicker of one little green leaf but the light 
 and sound of a forest, of which the leaf is a 
 part, I know that to be true, which I should 
 as soon doubt as that the tide returns or that 
 the sap rises or that dawn is a ceaseless 
 flashing light beneath the circuit of the stars. 
 Spiritual logic demands it. 
 
 It would ill become me to do otherwise. 
 I would as little, however, deny that this 
 inward vision is sometimes imperfect and 
 untrustworthy, as I would assert that it is 
 infallible. There is no common face of good 
 or evil; and in like fashion the aspect of 
 
 78
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 this so-called mystery is variable as the lives 
 of those in whom it dwells. With some it 
 is a prescience, more akin to instinct than to 
 reason, and obtains only among the lesser 
 possibilities, as when one beholds another 
 where in the body none is ; or a scene not 
 possible, there, in that place ; or a face, a 
 meeting of shadows, a disclosure of hazard 
 or accident, a coming into view of happen- 
 ings not yet fulfilled. With some it is simply 
 a larger sight, more wide, more deep; not 
 habitual, because there is none of us who is 
 not subject to the law of the body ; and 
 sudden, because all tense vision is a passion 
 of the moment. It is as the lightning, whose 
 sustenance is sure for all that it has a second's 
 life. With a few it is a more constant com- 
 panion, a dweller by the morning thought, 
 by the noon reverie, by the evening dream. 
 It lies upon the pillow for some; to some it 
 is as though the wind disclosed pathways of 
 the air; a swaying branch, a dazzle on the 
 wave, the quick recognition in unfamiliar 
 eyes, is, for others, sufficient signal. Not 
 that these accidents of the manner need 
 concern us much. We have the faculty, or 
 we do not have it. Nor must we forget that 
 it can be the portion of the ignoble as well 
 as of those whose souls are clear. When it 
 is in truth a spiritual vision, then we are in 
 
 79
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 company of what is the essential life, that 
 which we call divine. 
 
 XIX 
 
 It was this that Columba had, this serene 
 perspicuity. That it was a conscious posses- 
 sion we know from his own words, for he 
 gave this answer to one who marvelled : 
 " Heaven has granted to some to see on 
 occasion in their mind, clearly and surely, 
 the whole of earth and sea and sky." 
 
 It is not unlikely that in the seventy years 
 which elapsed between Colum's death and 
 the writing of that lovely classic of the 
 Church, Adamnan's Vita St. Colittnbae, some 
 stories grew around the saint's memory which 
 were rather the tribute of childlike reverence 
 and love than the actual experiences of the 
 holy man himself. What then .'' A field in 
 May is not the less a daughter of Spring, 
 because the cowslip-wreaths found there may 
 have been brought from little wayward 
 garths by children who wove them lovingly 
 as they came. 
 
 Many of these strange records are mere 
 coincidences ; others reveal so happy a surety 
 in the simple faith of the teller that we need 
 only smile, and with no more resentment 
 than at a child who runs to say he has found 
 stars in a wayside pool. Others are rather 
 
 80
 
 THE ISI.E OF DREAMS 
 
 the keen insight of a ceaseless observation 
 than the seeing of an inward sense. But, 
 and perhaps oftener, they are not inherently 
 incredible. I do not think our forebears did 
 ill to give haven to these little ones of faith, 
 rather than to despise, or to drive them away. 
 I have already spoken of Columba as 
 another St. Francis, because of his tender- 
 ness for creatures. I recall now the lovely 
 legend (for I do not think Colum himself 
 attributed "second-sight" to an animal) 
 which tells how the old white pony which 
 daily brought the milk from the cow-shed to 
 the monastery came and put its head in the 
 lap of the aged and feeble abbot, thus mutely 
 to bid farewell. Let Adamnan tell it : " This 
 creature then coming up to the saint, and 
 knowing that his master would soon depart 
 from him, and that he would see his face no 
 more, began to utter plaintive moans, and, as 
 if a man, to shed tears in abundance into 
 the saint's lap, and so to weep, frothing 
 greatly. Which when the attendant saw, he 
 began to drive away that weeping mourner. 
 But the saint forbade him, saying, ' Let him 
 alone 1 As he loves me so, let him alone, 
 that into this my bosom he may pour out 
 the tears of his most bitter lamentation. 
 Behold, thou, a man, that hast a soul, yet in 
 no way hast knowledge of my end save what 
 
 Si
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 I have myself shown thee ; but to this brute 
 animal the Master Himself hath revealed 
 that his master is about to go away from 
 him.' And so saying, he blessed his sorrow- 
 ing servant the horse." 
 
 If there be any to whom the aged Colum 
 comforting the grief of his old white pony is 
 a matter of disdain or derision, I would not 
 have his soul in exchange for the dumb 
 sorrow of that creature. One would fare 
 further with that sorrow, though soulless, 
 than with the soul that could not understand 
 that sorrow. 
 
 If one were to quote from Adamnan's 
 three Books of the Prophecies, Miracles, and 
 Visions of Columba, there would be another 
 book. Amid much that is childlike, and a 
 little that is childish, what store of spiritual 
 beauty and living symbol in these three 
 books — the Book of Prophetic Revelations, 
 the Book of Miracles of Power, the Book of 
 Angelic Visitations. But there, as elsewhere, 
 one must bear in remembrance that, in spir- 
 itual sight, there is symbolic vision as well as 
 actual vision. When Colum saw his friend 
 Columbanus (who, unknown to any on lona, 
 had set out in his frail coracle from the Isle 
 of Rathlin) tossed in the surges of Corryvre- 
 chan ; or when, nigh Glen Urquhart, he 
 hurried forward to minister to an old dying 
 
 82
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Pict "who had lived well by the light of 
 nature," and whose house, condition, and 
 end had been suddenly revealed to him : 
 then we have actual vision. When Aithne, 
 his mother, dreamed that an angel showed 
 her a garment of so surpassing a loveliness 
 that it was as though woven of flowers and 
 rainbows, and then threw it on high, till its 
 folds expanded and covered every mountain- 
 top from the brows of Connaught to the 
 feet of the Danish sea, and so revealed to 
 her what manner of son she bore within her 
 womb; or when, in the hour of Colum's 
 death, the aged son of Tailchan beheld the 
 whole expanse of air flooded with the blaze 
 of angels' wings, which trembled with their 
 songs : then we have symbolic vision. And 
 sometimes we have that which partakes of 
 each, as when (as Adamnan tells us in his 
 third book) Colum saw angels standing upon 
 the rocks on the opposite side of the Sound 
 which divides lona from the Ross of Mull, 
 calling to his soul to cross to them, yet, as 
 they assembled and beckoned, mysteriously 
 and suddenly restrained, for his hour was 
 not come. 
 
 And in all actual vision there is gradation ; 
 from what is so common, premonition, to 
 what is not common, prescience, and to what 
 is rare, revelation. Thus when the labourers 
 
 83
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 on lona looked up from the fields and saw 
 the aged abbot whom they so loved, borne 
 in a cart to give them benediction at seed- 
 sowing, many among them knew that they 
 would not see Colum again, and Colum 
 knew it, and so shared that premonition. 
 And when, many years before, he and the 
 abbot Comgell, returning from a futile con- 
 ference of the kings Aedh and Aidan, rested 
 by a spring, concerning which Colum said 
 that the day would come when it would 
 be filled with human blood, "because my 
 people, the Hy-Neill, and the Pictish folk, 
 thy relations according to the flesh, will wage 
 war by this fortress of Cethim close by," 
 Comgell learned, through Colum's fore- 
 knowledge, of what did in truth come to 
 pass. Again, when Colum bade a brother 
 go three days thence to the sea-shore on the 
 west side of lona, and lie in readiness to 
 help " a certain guest, a crane to wit, beaten 
 by the winds during long and circuitous and 
 aerial flights, which will arrive after the ninth 
 hour of the day, very weary and sore dis- 
 tressed," and bade him to lift it and tend it 
 lovingly for three days and three nights till 
 it should have strength to return to "its 
 former sweet home," and to do this out of 
 love and courtesy because " it comes from 
 our fatherland " — and when all happens and 
 
 84
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 is done as the saint foretold and commanded, 
 then we have revelation, the vision that is 
 absolute, the knowledge that is the atmos- 
 phere of the inevitable. It would take a 
 book indeed to tell all the stories of Colum- 
 ba's visionary and prophetic powers. That 
 I write at this length concerning him, indeed, 
 is because he is himself lona. Columba is 
 Christian lona, as much as lona is Icolmkill. 
 I have often wondered (because of a passage 
 in Adamnan) if the island be not indeed 
 named after him, the Dove : for as Adamnan 
 says incidentally, the name Columba is iden- 
 tical with the Hebrew name Jonah, also 
 signifying a Dove, and by the Hebrews pro- 
 nounced lona. 
 
 It is enough now to recall that this man, 
 so often erring but so human always, in 
 whose life we see the soul of lona as in a 
 glass, is become the archetype of his race, as 
 lona is the microcosm of the Gaelic world. 
 That he came into this life heralded by 
 dreams and visions, that from his youth 
 onward to old age he knew every mystery of 
 dream and vision, and that before and after 
 his death his soul was revealed to others 
 through dreams and visions, is but an added 
 hieratic grace : yet we do well to recall often 
 how these dreams before and these visions 
 after were angelical, and nobly beautiful : 
 
 85
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 how there was left of him, and to his little 
 company, and to us for remembrance, that 
 last signal vision of a blaze of angelic wings, 
 more intolerable than the sun at noon, the 
 tempestuous multitude trembling with the 
 storm of song. 
 
 XX 
 
 One day, walking by a reedy lochan on 
 the Ross of Mull, not far inland from 
 Fionnaphort, where is the ferry for Baile 
 Mor of lona, I met an old man who seemed 
 in sorrow. When he spoke I was puzzled 
 by some words which were not native there, 
 and then I learned that he had long lived in 
 Edinburgh and later in Dunfermline, and 
 in his work had associated with Hollanders 
 and others of the east seas. 
 
 He had come back, in his old age, to " see 
 the place of his two loves" — the hamlet in 
 Earraid, where his old mother had blessed 
 him "forty year back," and the little farm 
 where Jean Cameron had kissed him and 
 promised to be true. He had gone away as 
 a soldier, and news reached them of his 
 death ; and when he came out of the Indies, 
 and went up Leith Walk to the great post- 
 house in Edinburgh, it was to learn that the 
 Earraid cottage was empty, and that Jean 
 was no longer Jean Cameron. 
 
 86
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 There was not a touch of bitterness in the 
 old man's words. " It was my name, for one 
 thing," he said simply: "you see, there 's 
 many a * J. Macdonald ' in the Highland 
 regiments ; and the mistake got about that 
 way. No, no — the dear lass wasna to 
 blame. And I never lost her love. When 
 I found out where she was I went to see her 
 once more, and to tell her I understood, and 
 loved her all the same. It was hard, in a 
 way, when I found she had made a loveless 
 marriage, but human nature 's human nature, 
 and I could not but be proud and glad that 
 she had nane but puir Jamie Macdonald in 
 her heart. I told her I would be true to her, 
 and since she was poor, would help her, an' 
 wi' God's kindness true I was, an' helped her 
 too. For her man did an awfu' business one 
 day, and was sentenced for life. She had 
 three bairns. Well, I keepit her an' them — 
 though I ne'er saw them but once in the year, 
 for she had come back to the west, her heart 
 brast with the towns. First one bairn died, 
 then another. Then Jean died." 
 
 The old man resumed suddenly : " I had 
 put all my savings into the Grand North 
 Bank. When that failed I had nothing, for 
 with the little that was got back I bought a 
 good 'prenticeship for Jean's eldest. Since 
 then I 've lived by odd jobs. But I 'm old 
 
 87
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 now, and broke. Every day an' every night 
 I think o' them two, my mother an' Jean." 
 
 " She must have been a leal fine woman," 
 I said, but in Gaelic. With a flash he looked 
 at me, and then said slowly, as if remember- 
 ing, " Eudail de mhnathan an domhain" 
 " Treasure of all the women in the world." 
 
 I have often thought of old " Jamie Mac- 
 donald " since. How wonderful is deep love ! 
 This man was loyal to his love in long 
 absence, and was not less loyal when he 
 found that she was the wife of another; and 
 gave up thought of home and comfort and 
 companion-ship, so that he might make life 
 more easy for her and the children that were 
 not his. He had no outer reward for this, 
 nor looked for any. 
 
 He had become a " Methody," and 
 preached; so I was told of him contemptu- 
 ously, afterward. I would have liked to hear 
 James Macdonald preach. The words might 
 have been uncouth, but not the spirit. 
 
 We crossed to Balliemore together, and 
 when I came upon him next day by the 
 Reilig Odhran, I asked him what he thought 
 of lona. 
 
 He looked at the grey worn stones, " the 
 stairway of the Kings," the tombs, the carved 
 crosses, the grey ruin of the wind-harried 
 cathedral, and with a wave of his hand, said
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 simply, " Comunn mo ghaoil" " 'Tis a com- 
 panionship after my heart." 
 
 I do not doubt that the old man went on 
 his way comforted by the grey silence and 
 grey beauty of this ancient place, and that 
 he found in lona what would be near him 
 for the rest of his days. 
 
 . XXI 
 
 Once when I was sailing to Tiree, I stopped 
 at lona, and went to see an old woman named 
 Giorsal. She was of my own people, and, 
 not being lona-bom, the islanders called her 
 the foreigner. She had a daughter named 
 Elasaidh, or Elsie as it is generally given in 
 English, and I wanted to see her even more 
 than the old woman. 
 
 " Where is Elsie ? " I asked, after our 
 greetings were done. 
 
 Giorsal looked at me sidelong, and then 
 shifted the kettle, and busied herself with 
 the teapot. 
 
 I repeated the question. 
 
 " She is gone," the old woman said, with- 
 out looking at me. 
 
 " Gone ? Where has she gone to ? " 
 
 " I might as w^ell ask you to tell me that." 
 
 " Is she married . . . had she a lover 
 ... or ... or ... do you mean that 
 she . . . that you . . . have lost her?" 
 
 89
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 " She 's gone. That 's all I know. But 
 she isn't married, so far as I know : and I 
 never knew any man she fancied: and 
 neither I nor any other on lona has seen 
 her dead body; and by St. Martin's Cross, 
 neither I nor any other saw her leave the 
 island. And that was more than a year ago." 
 
 " But, Giorsal, she must have left lona 
 and gone to Mull, or maybe gone away in a 
 steamer, or " 
 
 " It was in midwinter, and when a heavy gale 
 was tearing through the Sound. There was 
 no steamer and no boat that day. There isn't 
 a boat of lona that could have taken the sea 
 that day. And no — Elsie wasna drowned. 
 I see that 's what 's in your mind. She just 
 went out o' the house again cryin'. I asked 
 her what was wrong wi' her. She turned an' 
 smiled, an' because o' that witherin' smile I 
 couldna say a word. She went up behind 
 the Ruins, and no one saw her after that but 
 Ian Donn. He saw her among the bulrushes 
 in the swamp over by Staonaig. She was 
 laughing an' talking to the reeds, or to the 
 wind in the reeds. So Ian Donn says." 
 
 " And what do you say, Giorsal ? " 
 
 The old woman went to the door, looked 
 out, and closed it. When she returned, she 
 put another bit on the fire, and kept her gaze 
 on the red glow. 
 
 90
 
 THE ISLE OK DREAMS 
 
 " Do you know much about them old lona 
 monks ? " she asked abruptly. 
 
 " What old monks ? " 
 
 " Them as they call the Culdees. You 
 used to be askin' lots o' questions about 
 them. Ay ? well . . . they aye hated folk 
 from the North, an' women-folk above all." 
 
 I waited, silent. 
 
 " And Elsie, poor lass, she hated them in 
 turn. She was all for the wild clansmen out 
 o' Skye and the Long Island. She said she 
 wished the Siol Leoid had come to lona 
 before Colum built the big church. And for 
 why ? Well, there 's this, for one thing : 
 For months a monk had come to her o' 
 nights in her sleep, and said he would kill 
 her, because she was a heathen. She went 
 to the minister at last, and said her say. He 
 told her she was a foolish wench, and was 
 sore angry with her. So then she went to 
 old Mary Gillespie, out by the lochan beyond 
 Fionnaphort on the Ross yonder — her that 
 has the sight an' a power o' the old wisdom. 
 After that she took to meeting friends in the 
 moonshine." 
 
 " Friends ? " 
 
 "Ay. There 's no call to name names. 
 One day she told me that she had been 
 bidden to go over to them. If she didn't, 
 the monks would kill her, they said. The 
 
 91
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 monks are still the strongest here, they told 
 her, or she me, I forget which. That is, 
 except over by Staonaig. Up between Sgeur 
 lolaire and Cnoc Druidean there 's a path 
 that no monk can go. There, in the old 
 days, they burned a woman. She was not a 
 woman, but they thought she was. She was 
 one o' the Sorrows of the Shee, that they 
 put out to suffer for them, an' get the mortal 
 ill. That 's the plague to them. It 's ill to 
 any that bruigs harm on thevi. That 's why 
 the monks arena strong over by Staonaig 
 way. But I told my girl not to mind. She 
 was safe wi' me, I said. She said that was 
 true. For weeks I heard no more o' that 
 monk. One night Elsie came in smiling an' 
 pluckin' wild roses. ' Breisleach ! ' I cried, 
 'what 's the meanin' o' roses in January?' 
 She looked at me, frighted, an' said nothin', 
 but threw the things on the fire. It was 
 next day she went away." 
 
 "And " 
 
 " An' that 's all. Here 's the tea. Ay, an' 
 for sure here 's my good man. Whist, now 1 
 Rob, do you see who 's here ? " 
 
 XXII 
 
 Nothing is more strange than the confused 
 survival of legends and pagan faiths and 
 early Christian beliefs, such as may be found 
 
 92
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Still in some of the isles. A Tiree man, 
 whom I met some time ago on the boat that 
 was taking us both to the west, told me 
 there 's a story that Mary Magdalene lies in 
 a cave in lona. She roamed the world with 
 a blind man who loved her, but they had no 
 sin. One day they came to Knoidart in 
 Argyll. Mary Magdalene's first husband 
 had tracked her there, and she knew that he 
 would kill the blind man. So she bade him 
 lie down among some swine, and she herself 
 herded them. But her husband came and 
 laughed at her. ''That is a fine boar you 
 have there," he said. Then he put a spear 
 through the blind man. " Now I will take 
 your beautiful hair," he said. He did this, 
 and went away. She wept till she died. 
 One of Colum's monks found her, and took 
 her to lona, and she was buried in a cave. 
 No one but Colum knew who she was. 
 Colum sent away the man, because he was 
 always mooning and lamenting. She had a 
 great wonderful beauty to her. 
 
 It is characteristic enough, even to the 
 quaint confusion that could make Mary 
 Magdalene and St. Columba contemporary. 
 But as for the story, what is it but the uni- 
 versal Gaelic legend of Diarmid and Grania ? 
 They too wandered far to escape the avenger. 
 It does not matter that their " beds " are 
 
 93
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 shown in rock and moor, from Glenmoriston 
 to Loch Awe, from Lora Water to West 
 Loch Tarbert, with an authenticity as abso- 
 lute as that which discovers them almost 
 anywhere between Donegal and Clare ; nor 
 that the death-place has many sites betwixt 
 Argyll and Connemara. In Gaelic Scotland 
 every one knows that Diarmid was wounded 
 to the death on the rocky ground between 
 Tarbert of Loch Fyne and the West Loch. 
 Every one knows the part the boar played, 
 and the part Finn played. 
 
 Doubtless the story came by way of the 
 Shannon to the Loch of Shadows, or from 
 Cuculain's land to Dfin Sobhairce on the 
 Antrim coast, and thence to the Scottish 
 mainland. In wandering to the isles, it lost 
 something both of Eire and Alba. The 
 Campbells, too, claimed Diarmid; and so 
 the Hebrideans would as soon forget him. 
 So there, by one byplay of the mind or 
 another, it survived in changing raiment. 
 Perhaps an islesman had heard a strange 
 legend about Mary Magdalene, and so 
 named Grania anew. Perhaps a story-teller 
 consciously wove it the new way. Perhaps 
 an lona man, hearing the tale in distant 
 Barra or Uist, in Coll or Tiree, " buried " 
 Mary in a cave of Icolmkill. 
 
 The notable thing is, not that a primitive 
 
 94
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 legend should love fantastic raiment, but 
 that it should be so much alike, where the 
 Syrian wanders from waste to waste, by 
 the camp-fires of the Basque muleteers, and 
 in the rainy lands of the Gael. 
 
 In Mingulay, one of the south isles of the 
 Hebrides, in South Uist, and in lona, I have 
 heard a fundamentally identical tale told 
 with striking variations. It is a tale so wide- 
 spread that it has given rise to a pathetic 
 proverb, " Is mairg a loisgeadh a chlarsach 
 dut," " Pity on him who would burn the harp 
 for you." 
 
 In Mingulay, the "harper" who broke his 
 " harp " for a woman's love was a young man, 
 a fiddler. For three years he wandered out 
 of the west into the east, and when he had 
 made enough money to buy a good share in 
 a fishing-boat, he came back to Mingulay. 
 When he reached his Mary's cottage, at 
 dusk, he played her favourite air, an " oran 
 leannanachd : " but when she came out it 
 was with a silver ring on her left hand and 
 a baby in her arms. Thus poor Padruig 
 Macneill knew Mary had broken her troth 
 and married another man, and so he went 
 down to the shore and played the lament 
 for the dead that is called a " marbh-rann," 
 and then broke his fiddle on the rocks ; and 
 when they came upon him in the morning 
 
 95
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 he had the strings of it round his neck. In 
 Uist, the instrument is more vaguely called a 
 " tiompan," and here, on a bitter cold night in 
 a famine time, the musician breaks it so as 
 to feed the fire to warm his wife — a sacri- 
 fice ill repaid by the elopement of the hard 
 woman that night. In lona, the tale is of an 
 Irish piper who came over to Icolmkill on a 
 pilgrimage, and to lay his "peeb-h'yanna" ■ 
 on " the holy stones; " but, when there, he 
 got word that his young wife was ill, so he 
 " made a loan of his clar," and with the 
 money returned to Derry, only to find that 
 his dear had gone away with a soldier to 
 the Americas. 
 
 The legendary history of lona would be 
 as much Pagan as Christian. To-day, at 
 many a ceilidh by the warm hearths in winter, 
 one may hear allusions to the Scandinavian 
 pirates, or to their more ancient and obscure 
 kin, the Fomor. The Fomor or Fomorians 
 were a people that lived before the Gael, 
 and had their habitations in the isles : fierce 
 prowlers of the sea, who loved darkness 
 and cold and storm, and drove herds of 
 wolves across the deeps. In other words, 
 they were elemental forces. But the name 
 
 I The Irish pipes are called " Piob-theannaich " to 
 distinguish them from the " Piob " or " Piob-Mh6r " 
 of the Highlands. 
 
 96
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 is sometimes used for the Norse pirates who 
 ravaged the west, from the Lews to the 
 Town of the Hurdle-Ford, as Dublin is 
 called in Gaelic. 
 
 In poetic narration " the men of Lochlin " 
 occurs oftener: sometimes the "Summer- 
 sailors," as the Vikings called themselves ; 
 sometimes, perhaps oftenest, the " Danes." 
 The Vikings have left numerous personal 
 names among the islanders, notably the 
 general term " summer-sailors," somerledi, 
 which survives as Somerled. Many Macleods 
 and Macdonalds are called Somerled, Torquil 
 (also Torcall, Thorkill), and Manus (Mag- 
 nus), and in the Hebrides surnames such as 
 Odrum betray a Norse origin. A glance at 
 any good map will reveal how largely the 
 capes and promontories and headlands, and 
 small bays and havens of the west, remember 
 the lords of the Suderoer. 
 
 The fascination of this legendary history 
 is in its contrast of the barbaric and the 
 spiritual. Since I was a child I have been 
 held spell-bound by this singular union. To 
 see the Virgin Mary in the sombre and 
 terrible figure of the Washer of the Ford, or 
 spiritual destiny in that of the Woman with 
 the Net, was natural : as to believe that the 
 same Columba could be as tender as St. 
 Bride or gentle as St. Francis, and yet could 
 
 97
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 thrust the living Oran back into his grave, 
 or prophecy, as though himself a beUever in 
 the druidic wisdom, by the barking of a 
 favourite hound that had a white spot on his 
 forehead — Donnalaich chon chinain. 
 
 XXIII 
 
 Once more, for an instance of the grafting 
 of Christian thought and imagery on pagan 
 thought and imagery, I take a few pages of 
 the introductory part to the story of " The 
 Woman with the Net," in a later volume." 
 They tell of a young monk who, inspired by 
 Colum's holy example, went out of lona as a 
 missionary to the Pictish heathen of the 
 north. 
 
 When ArtSn had kissed the brow of every 
 white-robed brother on lona, and had been 
 thrice kissed by the aged Colum, his heart 
 was filled with gladness. 
 
 It was late summer, and in the afternoon- 
 light peace lay on the green waters of the 
 Sound, on the green grass of the dunes, on 
 the domed wicker-woven cells of the culdees 
 over whom the holy Colum ruled, and on 
 the little rock-strewn hill which rose above 
 where stood Colum's wattled church of 
 sun-baked mud. The abbot walked slowly 
 
 1 The Dominion of Dreams. 
 
 98
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 by the side of the young man. Colum was 
 tall, with hair long and heavy but white as 
 the canna, and with a beard that hung low 
 on his breast, grey as the moss on old firs. 
 His blue eyes were tender. The youth — 
 for though he was a grown man he seemed a 
 youth beside Colum — had beauty. He was 
 tall and comely, with yellow curling hair, 
 and dark-blue eyes, and a skin so white that 
 it troubled some of the monks who dreamed 
 old dreams and washed them away in tears 
 and scourgings. 
 
 " You have the bitter fever of youth upon 
 you, Artan," said Colum, as they crossed 
 the dunes beyond Dun-I ; "but you have 
 no fear, and you will be a flame among these 
 Pictish idolaters, and you will be a lamp to 
 show them the way." 
 
 " And when I come again, there will be 
 clappings of hands, and hymns, and many 
 rejoicings ? " 
 
 " I do not think you will come again," said 
 Colum. " The wild people of these north- 
 lands will burn you, or crucify you, or put 
 you upon the crahslat, or give you thirst and 
 hunger till you die. It will be a great joy 
 for you to die like that, Artan, my son ? " 
 
 "Ay, a great joy," answered the young 
 monk, but with his eyes dreaming away from 
 his words. 
 
 99
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Silence was between them as they neared 
 the cove where a large coracle lay, with three 
 men in it. 
 
 " Will God be coming over the water to 
 lona when I am away ? " asked Artan. 
 
 Colum stared at him. 
 
 " Is it likely that God would come here in 
 a coracle ? " he asked, with scornful eyes. 
 
 The young man looked abashed. For 
 sure, God would not come in a coracle, just 
 as he himself might come. He knew by 
 that how Colum had reproved him. He 
 would come in a cloud of fire, and would be 
 seen from far and near. Artan wondered if 
 the place he was going to was too far north 
 for him to see that greatness ; but he feared 
 to ask. 
 
 " Give me a new name," he asked ; " give 
 me a new name, my father." 
 
 " What name will you have ?" 
 
 " Servant of Mary." 
 
 " So be it, Artan Gille-Mhoire." 
 
 With that Colum kissed him and bade 
 farewell, and Artan sat down in the coracle, 
 and covered his head with his mantle, and 
 wept and prayed. 
 
 The last word he heard was. Peace ! 
 
 " That is a good word, and a good thing," 
 he said to himself; "and because I am the 
 Servant of Mary, and the Brother of Jesu
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 the Son, I will take peace to the Cruitni, 
 who know nothing of that blessing of the 
 blessings." 
 
 When he unfolded his mantle, he saw that 
 the coracle was already far from lona. The 
 south wind blew, and the tides swept north- 
 ward, and the boat moved swiftly across the 
 water. The sea was ashine with froth and 
 small waves leaping like lambs. 
 
 In the boat were Thorkeld, a helot of 
 lona, and two dark wild-eyed men of the 
 north. They were Picts, but could speak 
 the tongue of the Gael. Myrdu, the Pictish 
 king of Skye, had sent them to lona, to bring 
 back from Colum a culdee who could show 
 wonders. " And tell the chief Druid of the 
 God-men," Myrdu had said, " that if his 
 culdee does not show me good wonders, and 
 so make me believe in his two gods and the 
 w'oman, I will put an ash-shaft through his 
 body from the hips and out at his mouth, and 
 send him back on the north tide to the Isle 
 of the White-Robes." 
 
 The sun was already among the outer isles 
 when the coracle passed near the Isle of 
 Columns. A great noise was in the air: the 
 noise of the waves in the caverns, and 
 the noise of the tide, like sea-wolves growl- 
 ing, and like bulls bellowing in a narrow 
 pass of the hills.
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 A sudden current caught the boat, and it 
 began to drift towards great reefs white with 
 ceaseless torn streams. 
 
 Thorkeld leaned from the helm, and 
 shouted to the two Picts. They did not stir, 
 but sat staring, idle with fear. 
 
 Artan knew now that it was as Colum had 
 said. God would give him glory soon. 
 
 So he took the little clarsach he had for 
 hymns, for he was the best harper on lona, 
 and struck the strings, and sang. But the 
 Latin words tangled in his throat, and he 
 knew too that the men in the boat would not 
 understand what he sang; also that the older 
 gods still came far south, and in the caves of 
 the Isle of Columns were demons. There 
 was only one tongue common to all ; and 
 since God had wisdom beyond that of Colum 
 himself. He would know the song in Gaelic 
 as well as though sung in Latin. 
 
 So Artan let the wind take his broken 
 hymn, and he made a song of his own, and 
 sang : 
 
 O Heavenly Mary, Queen of the Elements, 
 And you, Brigit the fair with the little harp, 
 And all the saints, and all the old gods 
 (And it is not one of them I 'd be disowning), 
 Speak to the Father, that he may save us from 
 drowning. 
 
 Then seeing that the boat drifted closer, 
 he sang again :
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Save us from the rocks and the sea, Queen of Heaven ! 
 And remember that I am a Culdee of lona, 
 And that Colum has sent me to the Cruitni 
 To sing them the song of peace lest they be damned for 
 ever! 
 
 Thorkeld laughed at that. 
 
 "Can the woman put swimming upon 
 you ? " he said roughly. " I would rather 
 have the good fin of a great fish now than 
 any woman in the skies." 
 
 " You will bum in hell for that," said 
 Artan, the holy zeal warm at his heart. 
 
 But Thorkeld answered nothing. His hand 
 was oh the helm, his eyes on the foaming 
 rocks. Besides, what had he to do with the 
 culdee's hell or heaven ? When he died, he, 
 who was a man of Lochlann, would go to his 
 own place. 
 
 One of the dark men stood, holding the 
 mast. His eyes shone. Thick words swung 
 from his lips, like seaweed thrown out of a 
 hollow by an ebbing wave. 
 
 The coracle swerved, and the four men 
 were wet with the heavy spray. 
 
 Thorkeld put his oar in the water, and the 
 swaying craft righted. 
 
 " Glory to God," said Artan. 
 
 " There is no glory to your god in this," 
 said Thorkeld scornfully. " Did you not 
 hear what Necta sang ? He sang to the 
 woman in there that drags men into the 
 
 103
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 caves, and throws their bones on the next 
 tide. He put an incantation upon her, and 
 she shrank, and the boat slid away from the 
 rocks." 
 
 " That is a true thing," thought Artan. He 
 wondered if it was because he had not sung 
 his hymn in the holy Latin. 
 
 When the last flame died out of the west, 
 and the stars came like sheep gathering at 
 the call of the shepherd, Artan remembered 
 that he had not said his prayers nor sung 
 the vesper hymn. 
 
 He lay back and listened. There were no 
 bells calling across the water. He looked 
 into the depths. It was Manann's kingdom, 
 and he had never heard that God was there. 
 He looked long. Then he stared into the 
 dark -blue star-strewn sky. 
 
 Suddenly he touched Thorkeld. 
 
 " Tell me," he said, " how far north has 
 the Cross of Christ come ? " 
 
 " By the sea-way it has not come here yet. 
 Murdoch the Freckled came with it this way, 
 but he was pulled into the sea, and he died." 
 
 " Who pulled him into the sea ? " 
 
 Thorkeld stared into the running wave. 
 He had no words. 
 
 Artan lay still for a long while. 
 
 " It will go ill with me," he thought, " if 
 Mary cannot see me so far away from lona, 
 
 104
 
 THE ISLE OK DREAMS 
 
 and if God will not listen to me. Colum 
 should have known that, and given me a 
 holy leaf with the fair branching letters on 
 it, and the Latin words that are the words 
 of God." 
 
 Then he spoke to the man who had sung. 
 
 " Do you know of Mary, and God, and the 
 Son, and the Spirit ? " 
 
 "You have too many Gods, Culdee," 
 answered the Pict sullenly : " for of these 
 one is your god's son, and the other is the 
 woman his mother, and the third is the ghost 
 of an ancestor." 
 
 Artan frowned. 
 
 " The curse of the God of Peace upon you 
 for that," he said angrily ; " do you know 
 that you have hell for your dwelling-place if 
 you speak evil of God the Father, and the 
 Son, and the Mother of God ? " 
 
 " How long have they been in lona, White- 
 Robe ? " 
 
 The man spoke scornfully. Artan knew 
 they had not been there many years. He 
 had no words. 
 
 " My fathers worshipped the Sun on the 
 Holy Isle before ever your great Druid that 
 is called Colum crossed the Moyle. Were 
 your three gods in the coracle with Colum ? 
 They were not on the Holy Isle when he 
 came." 
 
 105
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 " They were coming there," answered 
 Artan confusedly. "It is a long, long way 
 from — from — from the place they were sail- 
 ing from." 
 
 Necta listened sullenly. 
 
 " Let them stay on lona," he said : " gods 
 though they be, it would fare ill with them if 
 they came upon the Woman with the Net." 
 Then he turned on his side, and lay by the 
 man Darach, who was staring at the moon 
 and muttering words that neither Artan nor 
 Thorkeld knew. 
 
 A white calm fell. The boat lay like a 
 leaf on a silent pool. There was nothing 
 between that dim wilderness and the vast 
 sweeping blackness filled with quivering 
 stars, but the coracle, that a wave could 
 crush. 
 
 XXIV 
 
 One day, on lona, I met an old woman who 
 had been gathering driftwood in the haven 
 called Port-na-Churaich — the haven of the 
 coracle, for it was there St. Colum landed 
 on the day Christ's hand steered the helm to 
 the Holy Isle. She was weary with her 
 burthen, and had rested on a ledge of gran- 
 ite, and there had fallen asleep. I stood a 
 long time looking at her. I had not seen 
 her for some years, not since the death of 
 
 1 06
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 her daughter in the Sleat of Skye : but it 
 was not at the wayworn sadness of the old 
 figure I was looking, though that was in my 
 thoughts. I was thinking of what I had 
 heard of her. Long ago a poet of the isles 
 had put song upon song on her, as the say- 
 ing is : and one known to all of us had made 
 an ora7t-gkaoil about her which is still sung 
 from the Rhinns of Islay to The Seven 
 Hunters. When I was a child I had heard 
 often of the beauty of Mary Macarthur. But 
 sorrow, which had long lain as upon a rock 
 on the hills, looking at her, had come sud- 
 denly in the twilight, when all was well, 
 and took her heart in fierce swift hands, and 
 wrung it, till it was as tide-wrack left by the 
 ebb on dry sand. She was old, and her 
 beauty was gone away from her like a rain- 
 bow lifted from a wilderness, long before the 
 last of her partings came to her in Sleat of 
 Skye. 
 
 She too had been known for her songs. 
 They were pastoral and sweet, or of the sea 
 and wild and lamenting. One, telling of the 
 small, shaggy, long-horned kye coming with 
 a young herd-girl over the braes in mist and 
 crowding upon a loosened cliff, and so falling 
 into the surge of the tides a thousand feet 
 below, is well known among the few who 
 remember such things in the old tongue 
 
 107
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 that is being so swiftly forgotten : another, 
 of the sea-bulls, is a favourite iorram of the 
 boatmen of the middle isles : and Eachan 
 MacDougall, the blind poet of Skye, used 
 to sing to women in the twilight, over the 
 kindly tea or sup of milk and porridge, her 
 seven strange sad songs that are called " A 
 Day in My Heart." It was these only I 
 recalled now. They tell the lives of many 
 women. There is the dawn-song of wonder 
 and joy, the morning-song of the proud 
 heart, the noon-song of the sleeping passions 
 and sleeping thoughts, the afternoon song of 
 longing and blind anger and pain, the gloam- 
 ing song of regret and tears and silence, the 
 nightfall song of revolt and the heart aflame, 
 and the midnight song that is not sung, but 
 is smothered in ashes, or drowned in deep 
 water, or burned in the fierceness of fire. In 
 Eachan-Dall's poem, he says her beauty is 
 the beauty of the morning star in June, when 
 it is a white fire in a rose of flame. He says 
 her grace is the grace of the larch in an 
 April wind, of a reed in shaken waters, of a 
 wave tost like a white flower in the blue hair 
 of the sea, of a fawn moving through bracken 
 in the green dusk of old trees. He says men 
 will remember her beauty till they are old; 
 and their sons shall remember it; and their 
 son's sons. He says, " Surely in this fair 
 
 1 08
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 woman's heart is great joy and pride, for she 
 will be beautiful and glad all the days of her 
 life." And I recall the last of her songs, 
 " Flame on the Wind." I cannot give it 
 aright in English, for its long mournful 
 cadences, lifted on tides of passionate vain 
 regret and old grief, need the language of 
 the old world that has in it so much of the 
 sound of wind in trees and the lamentation 
 of wind and the sighing of waters. I thought 
 of it as I looked at old Mary Macarthur, 
 and of the ending of one verse : 
 
 O burning soul, 
 Can hills of ice assuage this burning fire ? 
 
 And then I remembered one of her love- 
 songs, she who had known so much love, 
 and had thrown treasures down barren rocks 
 into the cold seas, and had made a flaming 
 universe and eternity out of the pale hour of 
 a wintry noon. 
 
 It is dark here, my Love, my Pulse, my Heart, my 
 Flame : 
 
 Dark the night, dark with wind and cloud, the wind 
 without aim 
 
 Baffled and blind, the cloud low, broken, dragging, 
 lame, 
 
 And a stir in the darkness at the end of the room sigh- 
 ing my name, whispering my name ! 
 
 Is that the sea calling, or the hounds of the sea, or the 
 wind's hounds? 
 
 109
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Great is that dark noise under the black north wind 
 Out on the sea to-night: but still it is — still as the 
 
 frosts that bind 
 The stark inland waters in green depths where icebergs 
 
 grind — 
 In this noise of shaking storm in my heart and this 
 
 blast sweeping my mind ! 
 
 And now nothing of all this left, nothing but 
 a tired old woman, sad-eyed and furrowed, 
 poorly clad, a gatherer of driftwood. Hills 
 of ice had in truth assuaged this burning fire. 
 The noise of shaking storm had ebbed from 
 the troubled heart ; no blast now swept the 
 mind, but only the chill airs of winter froze 
 dreams and all old sweet thoughts, perhaps 
 memories even. Poor old woman, how white 
 and old and withered she looked, so forlorn 
 in her poor frayed clothes, in the sleep of 
 weariness, among the yellowing bracken by 
 the granite rock. Was it all gone, I won- 
 dered : all the dream, the wonder, the flame ? 
 Were they all gone, noons of passionate life, 
 twilights of peace and recaptured hopes, 
 nights uplifted in dreams or shaken with 
 tears and longings .-' 
 
 While I was dreaming and wondering, 
 wondering and dreaming, old Mary stirred, 
 and opened her eyes. At first sleep was 
 heavy on her, and I saw she was not yet 
 rightly awake. 
 
 " Do not stir," I said, " and I will sit down
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 here beside you, Mairi nic Ruaridh Doting 
 At that, and the familiar name, she knew me, 
 and was glad to tears, and welcomed me over 
 and over, as though I had come in some 
 impossible way out of the irrecoverable past. 
 " Yes, I had the tiredness indeed," she 
 added after a little, " but what of that ? For 
 I had the good sleep, and a thousand things 
 of goodness more, for I had a dream of 
 dreams. Do I remember it ? Yes, for sure, 
 I have it as clear as a cradle. I was lying 
 here, just as I will be now, with this faggot 
 here too, when a woman of beauty came up 
 the path and took the faggot and flung all the 
 sticks an' ends into the sea. ' What will you 
 be doing, lady ? ' I said, but not in anger, 
 only in the great wonder. ' 'Tis your sorrows 
 I 'm throwing away,' she said, with a voice 
 as sweet as to send the birds to the branches 
 — chuireadh e na Kebin\in crannaibh. 'It 
 is glad of that I am,' I said, ' for it is many 
 of them I have.' Then she said, ' You '11 
 have peace, Mary, and great joy, and your 
 songs and your beauty will never die.' So 
 the tears were at me at that, an' I cried, ' It 
 is only an aislitig you are ... a dream and 
 a vision ! ' ♦ No,' she said, ' an' by the same 
 token. Mar)-, I '11 tell you the song that you 
 were singing below your breath down there 
 on the shore :
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 " A Dhe na mara 
 
 Cuir todhar 's an tarruinn 
 
 Chon tachair an talaimh 
 
 Chon bailcidh dhuinn biaidh." ' 
 
 And sure, an' in truth, these M'ere the very 
 words I was singing to myself down there on 
 the shore . . . ' O God of the Sea, fill the 
 sea-wave with store of the good weed, to feed 
 the soil that will give us food.' And at that 
 my heart sank with fear and rose with glad- 
 ness, for who could this be but . . . an' sure 
 before I could put word to it, she said I am 
 Brighid. I went on the knees, and cried 
 gach la' agus oidhche thoir duinn do shcinih — 
 ' each day and night give us thy peace.' And 
 I was putting another word to it, for her, fair 
 Foster-Mother of Christ, when she looked at 
 me and said, ' I am older than Brighid of the 
 Mantle, Mary, and it is you that should know 
 that. I put songs and music on the wind 
 before ever the bells of the chapels were 
 rung in the West or heard in the East. I 
 am Brighid-nam-Bratta, but I am also Brig- 
 hid-Muirghin-na-tuinne, and Brighid-sluagh, 
 Brighid-nan-sitheach seang, Brighid-Binne- 
 Bheul-lhuchd-nan-trusganan-uaine, and I am 
 older than Aona and am as old as Luan. 
 And in Tir na h'oige my name is Suibhal- 
 bheann ; in Tir-fo-thuinn it is Cu-gorm ; and 
 in Tir na h'oise it is Sireadh-thall. And I
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 have been a breath in your heart. And the 
 day has its feet to it that will see me coming 
 into the hearts of men and women like a 
 flame upon dry grass, like a flame of wind in 
 a great wood. For the time of change is at 
 hand, Mairi nic Ruaridh Donn — though not 
 for you, old withered leaf on the dry branch, 
 though for you, too, when you come to us 
 and see all things in the pools of life yonder.' 
 
 " And at that I closed my eyes, and said 
 the line of the old poem that you will be 
 knowing well, the Laoidh Fhraoch — Bu 
 bhiime ua farch-chiuil do ghtith — sweeter 
 thy voice than the sweetest lute. 
 
 "And when I opened them she was not 
 there, but I was an old woman on the brae 
 above Port-na-Churaich, and when I looked 
 again it was you I saw and no other."' 
 
 I St. Brighid(in Gaelic pronounced sometimes Bride, 
 sometimes Breed), St. Bride of the Isles as she is lov- 
 ingly called in the Hebrides, has no name so dear to the 
 Gael as " Muirae-Chriosd," Christ's Foster-Mother, 
 a name bestowed on her by one of the most beautiful 
 of Celtic legends. In the isles of Gaelic Scotland her 
 most familiar name is Brigkidnani Bratta — St. Bridget 
 or St. Bride of the Mantle — from her having wrapt the 
 new-bom Babe in her mantle in Mary's hour of weak- 
 ness. She did not come into the Gaelic heart with the 
 Cross and Mary, but was there long before as Bride, 
 Brighid or Brithid of the Dedannans, those not 
 immortal but for long ages deathless folk who to the 
 Gael were as the Olympians to the Greeks. That 
 
 "3
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 I have thought often of old Mary Macar- 
 thur, and of her dream of holy St. Bride, and 
 of that older Brighid of the West, Mother of 
 Songs and Music — she who breathes in the 
 
 earlier Brighid was goddess of poetry and music, one 
 of the three great divinities of love, goddess of women, 
 the keeper of prophecies and dreams, the watcher of 
 the greater destinies, the guardian of the future. I 
 think she was no other than a Celtic Demeter — that 
 Demeter-Desphoena bom of the embrace of Poseidon, 
 who in turn is no other than Lir, the Oceanus of the 
 Gael : and instead of Demeter seeking and lamenting 
 Persephone in the underworld, it is Demeter-Erighid 
 seeking her brother (or, it may be, her son) Manan 
 (Manannan), God of the Sea, son of Oceanus, Lir — 
 and finding him at last in Iceland, etc. — as I write 
 here a little further on. Persephone and Manan are 
 symbols of the same Return of Life. 
 
 The other names are old Gaelic names : Brighid- 
 Miiirghin - na-iuinne , Brighid - Conception - of - the- 
 Waves ; Brighid-Sluagh (or Sloigh), Brighid of the 
 Immortal Host ; Brighid-nan-Sitheach-seang, Bridget 
 of the Slim Fairy Folk ; Brighid-Binne-Bhcul-thtichd- 
 nan-intsganau-uaine, Song-sweet (lit. melodious 
 mouth 'd) Brighid of the Tribe of the Green Mantles. 
 She is also called Brighid of the Harp, Brighid of the 
 Sorrowful, Brighid of Prophecy, Brighid of Pure Love, 
 St. Bride of the Isles, Bride of Joy, and other names. 
 Aona is an occasional and ancient form of Di-Aoin, 
 Friday ; and Luan, of Dihtatn, Monday. 
 
 Tir-na-A' Oige (commonly anglicised as Timanogue) 
 is the Land of (Eternal) Youth ; Tir-fo-thuitin is the 
 Country of the Waves ; and Tir-na-h^ oise is the Coun- 
 try of Ancient Years. The fairy names Siubhal-bheann, 
 Cii-garm, and Siread-thall respectively mean Moun- 
 tain-traveller, Grey Hound, and Seek-Beyond. 
 
 114
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 reed, on the wind, in the hearts of women 
 and in the minds of poets. For I too have 
 my dream, my memory of one whom as a 
 child I called Star-Eyes, and whom, later, I 
 called " Banmorair-na-mara," the Lady of 
 the Sea, and whom at last I knew to be no 
 other than the woman that is in the heart of 
 women. I was not more than seven when 
 one day, by a well, near a sea-loch in Argyll, 
 just as I was stooping to drink, my glancing 
 eyes lit on a tall woman standing among a 
 mist of wild-hyacinths under three great 
 sycamores. I stood, looking, as a fawn 
 looks, wide-eyed, unafraid. She did not 
 speak, but she smiled, and because of the 
 love and beauty in her eyes I ran to her. 
 She stooped and lifted blueness out of the 
 flowers as one might lift foam out of a pool, 
 and I thought she threw it over me. When 
 I was found, lying among the hyacinths, 
 dazed, and, as was thought, ill, I asked 
 eagerly after the lady in white and with hair 
 "all shiny-gold like buttercups," but when 
 I found I was laughed at, or at last, when I 
 passionately persisted, was told I was sun- 
 dazed and had been dreaming, I said no 
 more. But I did not forget. And for many 
 days, for weeks indeed, I stole away to seek 
 or be found by my white love, though she 
 had gone away or did not come again. It 
 
 "5
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 was years aftenvard that I heard a story 
 of a woman of the divine folk, who was 
 called the Lady of the Sea, and was a daugh- 
 ter of Lir, and went.lamenting upon the earth 
 because she had lost her brother Manan the 
 Beautiful, but came upon him at last among 
 the hills of Iceland and wooed him with 
 songs and flowers and brought him back 
 again, so that all the world of men rejoiced, 
 and ships sailed the seas in safety and nets 
 were filled with the fruit of the wave. And 
 it was years after that before I knew the 
 deeper wisdom, and wrote of the Shepherd- 
 ess the words that I now say again — "I 
 believe that we are close upon a great and 
 deep spiritual change ; I believe a new 
 redemption is even now conceived of the 
 Divine Spirit in the human heart, that is 
 itself as a woman, broken in dreams and 
 yet sustained in faith, patient, long-suffer- 
 ing, looking towards home. I believe that 
 though the Reign of Peace may be yet a 
 long way off, it is drawing near; and that 
 Who shall save us anew shall come divinely 
 as a Woman — but whether through mortal 
 birth, or as an immortal breathing upon our 
 souls, none can yet know. Sometimes I 
 dream of the old prophecy that Christ shall 
 come again upon lona; and of that later 
 prophecy which foretells, now as the Bride 
 
 ii6
 
 XPE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 of Christ, now as the Daughter of God, now 
 as the Divine Spirit embodied through mor- 
 tal birth — the coming of a new Presence 
 and Power; and dream that this may be 
 upon lona, so that the little Gaelic island 
 may become as the little Syrian Bethlehem. 
 But more wise it is to dream, not of hallowed 
 ground, but of the hallowed gardens of the 
 soul, wherein She shall appear white and 
 radiant. Or that, upon the hills, where we 
 are wandered, the Shepherdess shall call us 
 home." 
 
 Yes, I have thought often of Mary Mac- 
 arthur, that solitary old woman, poor and 
 desolate, once so beautiful : yet loved by 
 Brighid, the genius of our people. Was it 
 not our sorrowful Gaelic world I saw, when 
 I came upon the poor old woman — that 
 passing world of songs and beauty, of poets' 
 dreams and of broken hearts, that even now 
 in forlorn old age is loved again by Brighid 
 the White — Brighid the White, who even 
 yet may use the fading voice to lead the 
 wild trumpets of revelation ? 
 
 XXVI 
 
 We have in Ross and the Outer Isles a 
 singular legend, which has a beauty within 
 
 117
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 and without. A young crofter was unhappy 
 hi love and not fortunate in the hard way of 
 the hill-Ufe. When bad seasons come on 
 the back of the black wind, the croft-smoke 
 turns from blue to brown, as the saying is : 
 and bad seasons in succession had come to 
 the Strath, and every one of the scattered 
 clansfolk there had suffered, but none so 
 much as Fergus Dhu, who had lost sheep, 
 and crops, and the youth out of his heart. 
 
 One day he went idly across the boggy 
 moor under Cnoc Glas, mooning among the 
 loneroid and black heather where the white 
 tufts of canna were like blown foam of the 
 sea. A single tree grew on that waste, a 
 thorn that on a forgotten Beltane had been 
 withered into a grey Woman, the Fairy 
 Thorn or The Singing Tree or Tree of Bad 
 Music. At many a winter ceilidh by the 
 peat-glow tales were passed of what had 
 been seen or heard there : but they were 
 all at one in this, that only the happy and 
 fortunate were in peril there, that only the 
 unhappy and unfortunate might go that way, 
 and, indifferent, see the tall swift woman in 
 grey, or hear the thin music. 
 
 Likely that was why Fergus — Fergus Dhu 
 as he was called, because of his black hair, 
 and black eyes, and the dark hours into which 
 he so often fell — wandered that day along 
 
 ii8
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 the sodden bracken-covered sheep-ways. 
 When he came to the Thorn he saw no grey 
 woman, perhaps because there was no room 
 in his dreaming mind for any but one woman 
 who now would never warm to him but be a 
 kindly stranger always ; and heard no thin 
 air, gay or wild, perhaps because the sad lift 
 and fall in his heart was a daylong sound 
 that dulled his ears. But while he was staring 
 idly into the withered thorn he saw a short 
 stem break into little green leaves. He could 
 not believe what his eyes showed him, but 
 when he saw also pink and white blossoms 
 run in and out among the leaves and break 
 into a fall of snow, and felt the sudden 
 sweetness in the air about him, he believed. 
 He went closer, and his wonder grew when 
 he saw that the stem had seven holes in it. 
 He put his hand on the stem, and it came 
 away. There was a hole at each end, and 
 the thorn-reed was like any feadan. So he 
 put it to his mouth, and ran his familiar 
 fingers up and down the holes, for Fergus 
 Dhu was the cunningest player in the Strath. 
 He played till the whole Thorn went into 
 a wave of green. He played till a snow 
 of blossom came all over that greenness. 
 Although it was November, and wet, and 
 the hill-wind moaned searching the corries, 
 by the thorn it was like a May noon. Fergus 
 
 "9
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 looked at the sky, and saw that it was blue : 
 at the long moor, and saw that it was covered 
 with April yellow and with a shimmer of the 
 wings of little birds. He looked at the grey 
 hills to the east, and they were rose-red and 
 a star was above them : he looked at the 
 grey hills to the west, and they were blue as 
 peat-smoke and a rainbow leaned against 
 them. Then his heart filled with joy, and he 
 said to himself, " I have found my desire." 
 So he played his joy. As he played, the 
 rainbow leaned away from the grey hills of 
 the west, and took their sadness, and was no 
 more : the star sank behind the grey moun- 
 tains of the east: the long moor faded into 
 the old silence : the white foam and the 
 green wave ebbed from the thorn. 
 
 Fergus looked at the thom-pipe, and it was 
 only a black cloud-wet feadan with seven 
 mossy holes in it. 
 
 He "went away" in that hour. No one 
 saw him that night, or the next day, or the 
 next : and months and years passed, and 
 no one saw him, and his body was never 
 seen, though his bonnet was found near the 
 withered thorn. 
 
 In the seventh year after that a strange 
 thing happened. A new life quickened the 
 thorn. A thousand small green buds shook 
 out little fluttering green leaves, and, from
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 these, white moths of blossom continually 
 rose. Linnets sang on the branches. 
 
 One day Fergus Uhu came strolling that 
 way. lie had no memory of the years that 
 had gone, or with whom he had been, and 
 the sweet fatal accent was out of his ears. 
 But when he saw the thorn he remembered 
 his feadan, and took it from his coat-fold, 
 and played because of his gladness. The 
 tears fell from his eyes when he saw the 
 grey rain come down and blot out the new 
 life from the thorn, so that it was old and 
 withered again : and at the wet hill-wind 
 calling again its old mournful cry, wheeling 
 like a tired hawk above the far lamentation 
 of the sheep. " Why is this ? " he said. 
 " When I saw this lonely place in its sorrow 
 I played it into joy. And now when I come 
 upon it in its beauty, I have played it back 
 into the old sorrow. Grief to my heart that 
 it is so." 
 
 One man of the Strath saw Fergus Dhu 
 that day, and he spoke of Fergus as a thin 
 worn leaf that one sees through when it 
 hangs in the wind. Certainly no other saw 
 him, nor has seen him since. 
 
 XXVII 
 
 This tale of Fergus, who was fey, and 
 went down the west with strangers, is it not
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 also a symbol, even as Mary Macarthur, old 
 and poor but treasured and loved and cared 
 for by the Genius of our race ... is it not 
 also a symbol of the Gaelic heart, of the 
 Gaelic muse let me say ? For the Gaelic 
 muse seems to me the beautiful and sad 
 and waywardly joyous spirit of whom poor 
 Fergus was but the troubled image. Does 
 she, too, not go to and fro in a land where 
 rainbows bloom and fade above desolate 
 places and where a star hangs above the 
 holy hills of the east, seeking her desire : 
 going in sorrow, but, suddenly beholding the 
 world radiant, breaking into songs of joy 
 and laughter: coming again, after an evil 
 time, and finding the grey thorn of the world 
 full of the green leaf, blossom, and undying 
 youth, and, so finding, turning suddenly to 
 tears, and to the old sorrow, and to the 
 longing whose thirst is not to be quenched, 
 to the cry of the curlew for the waste, of the 
 heart going a long way from shadow to 
 shadow ? 
 
 One must with this lanthom of the spirit 
 look into the dark troubled water of the 
 Gaelic heart, too, I think, if one would 
 understand. How else can one understand 
 the joy that is so near to sorrow, the sorrow 
 that like a wave of the sea can break in a 
 moment into light and beauty? I have
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 heard often in effect, " This is no deep heart 
 that in one hour weeps, and in the next 
 laughs." But I know a deeper heart that in 
 one hour weeps and the next laughs, so deep 
 that light dies away within it, and silence 
 and the beginning and the end are one : the 
 heart of the sea. And there is another heart 
 that is deep, and weeps one hour and in the 
 next laughs : the heart of Night . . . where 
 Oblivion smiles, and it is day; sighs, and 
 the darkness is come. And there is another 
 heart that is deep, and weeps in one hour 
 and in the next laughs : the soul of man : 
 where tears and laughter are the fans that 
 blow the rose-white flame of life. And I am 
 well content that the Gaelic heart, that in one 
 hour weeps and in the next laughs, though 
 it be so sad and worn among smiling nations, 
 is in accord with the great spirits of the 
 world and with immortal things. 
 
 As I write, here on the hill-slope of Dun-I, 
 the sound of the furtive wave is as the sigh- 
 ing in a shell. I am alone between sea and 
 sky, for there is no other on this bouldered 
 height, nothing visible but a single blue 
 shadow that slowly sails the hillside. The 
 bleating of lambs and ewes, the lowing of 
 kine, these come up from the Machar that 
 lies between the west slopes and the shore- 
 
 123
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 less sea to the west ; these ascend as the 
 very smoke of sound. All round the island 
 there is a continuous breathing; deeper and 
 more prolonged on the west, where the open 
 sea is; but audible everywhere. The seals 
 on Soa are even now putting their breasts 
 against the running tide ; for I see a flashing 
 of fins here and there in patches at the north 
 end of the Sound, and already from the ruddy 
 granite shores of the Ross there is a congre- 
 gation of seafowl — gannets and guillemots, 
 skuas and herring-gulls, the long-necked 
 northern diver, the tern, the cormorant. In 
 the sunblaze, the waters of the Sound dance 
 their blue bodies and swirl their flashing 
 white hair o' foam ; and, as I look, they 
 seem to me like children of the wind and 
 the sunshine, leaping and running in these 
 flowing pastures, with a laughter as sweet 
 against the ears as the voices of children at 
 play. 
 
 The joy of life vibrates everywhere. Yet 
 the Weaver does not sleep, but only dreams. 
 He loves the sun-drowned shadows. They 
 are invisible thus, but they are there, in the 
 sunlight itself. Sure, they may be heard : 
 as, an hour ago, when on my way hither by 
 the Stairway of the Kings — for so some- 
 times they call here the ancient stones of the 
 mouldered princes of long ago — I heard a 
 
 124
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 mother moaning because of the son that had 
 had to go over-sea and leave her in her old 
 age ; and heard also a child sobbing, because 
 of the sorrow of childhood — that sorrow so 
 unfathomable, so incommunicable. And yet 
 not a stone's-throw from where I lie, half 
 hidden beneath an overhanging rock, is the 
 Pool of Healing. To this small, black-brown 
 tarn, pilgrims of every generation, for hun- 
 dreds of years, have come. Solitary, these ; 
 not only because the pilgrim to the Fount of 
 Eternal Youth must fare hither alone, and at 
 dawn, so as to touch the healing water the 
 moment the first sunray quickens it — but 
 solitary, also, because those who go in quest 
 of this Fount of Youth are the dreamers and 
 the Children of Dream, and these are not 
 many, and few come now to this lonely place. 
 Yet, an Isle of Dream lona is, indeed. Here 
 the last sun-worshippers bowed before the 
 Rising of God : here Columba and his hymn- 
 ing priests laboured and brooded; and here 
 Oran or his kin dreamed beneath the monk- 
 ish cowl that pagan dream of his. Here, too, 
 the eyes of Fionn and Oisln, and of many 
 another of the heroic men and women of the 
 Fianna, may have lingered; here the Pict 
 and the Celt bowed beneath the yoke of the 
 Norse pirate, who, too, left his dreams, or 
 rather his strangely beautiful soul-rainbows, 
 
 125
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 as a heritage to the stricken ; here, for 
 century after century, the Gael has lived, 
 suffered, joyed, dreamed his impossible, 
 beautiful dream ; as here, now, he still lives, 
 still suffers patiently, still dreams, and, 
 through all and over all, broods upon the 
 incalculable mysteries. He is an elemental, 
 among the elemental forces. He knows the 
 voices of wind and sea : and it is because the 
 Fount of Youth upon Dfin-I of lona is not 
 the only wellspring of peace, that the Gael 
 can front destiny as he does, and can endure. 
 Who knows where its tributaries are ? They 
 may be in your heart, or in mine, and in a 
 myriad others. 
 
 I would that the birds of Angus Ogue 
 might, for once, be changed, not, as fabled, 
 into the kisses of love, but into doves of 
 peace, that they might fly into the green 
 world, and nest there in many hearts, in 
 many minds, crooning their incommunicable 
 song of joy and hope. 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 A doomed and passing race. I have been 
 taken to task for these words. But they are 
 true, in the deep reality where they obtain. 
 Yes, but true only in one sense, however vital 
 that is. The Breton's eyes are slowly turning 
 from the enchanted West, and slowly his ears 
 
 126
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 are forgetting the whisper of the wind around 
 menhir and dolmen. The Manxman has ever 
 been the mere yeoman of the Celtic chivalry ; 
 but even his rude dialect perishes year by 
 year. In Wales, a great tradition survives ; 
 in Ireland, a supreme tradition fades through 
 sunset-hued horizons; in Celtic Scotland, a 
 passionate regret, a despairing love and 
 longing, narrows yearly before a dull and 
 incredibly selfish alienism. The Celt has at 
 last reached his horizon. There is no shore 
 beyond. He knows it. This has been the 
 burden of his song since Malvina led the 
 blind Oisin to his grave by the sea : " Even 
 the Children of Light must go down into 
 darkness." But this apparition of a passing 
 race is no more than the fulfilment of a 
 glorious resurrection before our very eyes. 
 For the genius of the Celtic race stands out 
 now with averted torch, and the light of it is 
 a glory before the eyes, and the flame of it 
 is blown into the hearts of the stronger 
 people. The Celt fades, but his spirit rises 
 in the heart and the mind of the Anglo-Celtic 
 peoples, with whom are the destinies of 
 generations to come. 
 
 I stop, and look seaward from this hill- 
 slope of Dfin-I. Yes, even in this Isle of 
 Joy, as it seems in this dazzle of golden light 
 and splashing wave, there is the like mortal 
 
 127
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 gloom and immortal mystery which moved 
 the minds of the old seers and bards. 
 Yonder, where that thin spray quivers 
 against the thyme-set cliff, is the Spouting 
 Cave, where to this day the Mar-Tarbh, 
 dread creature of the sea, swims at the full 
 of the tide. Beyond, out of sight behind 
 these craggy steeps, is Port-na-Churaich, 
 where, a thousand years ago, Columba 
 landed in his coracle. Here, eastward, is 
 the landing-place, for the dead of old, 
 brought hence out of Christendom for sacred 
 burial in the Isle of the Saints. All the 
 story of the Gael is here. lona is the 
 microcosm of the Gaelic world. 
 
 Last night, about the hour of the sun's 
 going, I lay upon the heights near the Cave, 
 overlooking the Machar — the sandy, rock- 
 frontiered plain of duneland on the west side 
 of lona, exposed to the Atlantic. There was 
 neither bird nor beast, no living thing to see, 
 save one solitary human creature. The man 
 toiled at kelp-burning. I watched the smoke 
 till it merged into the sea-mist that came 
 creeping swiftly out of the north, and down 
 from Uun-I eastward. At last nothing was 
 visible. The mist shrouded everything. I 
 could hear the dull, rhythmic beat of the 
 waves. That was all. No sound, nothing 
 visible. 
 
 128
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 It was, or seemed, a long while before a 
 rapid thud-thud trampled the heavy air. 
 Then I heard the rush, the stamping and 
 neighing, of some young mares, pasturing 
 there, as they raced to and fro, bewildered or 
 perchance in play. A glimpse I caught of 
 three, with flying manes and tails ; the others 
 were blurred shadows only. A swirl, and 
 the mist disclosed them; a swirl, and the 
 mist enfolded them again. Then, silence 
 once more. 
 
 Abruptly, though not for a long time there- 
 after, the mist rose and drifted seaward. 
 
 All was as before. The kelp-burner still 
 stood, straking the smouldering seaweed. 
 Above him a column ascended, bluely spiral, 
 dusked with shadow. 
 
 XXIX 
 
 The kelp-burner : who was he but the Gael 
 of the Isles? Who but the Gael in his old- 
 world sorrow .-' The mist falls and the mist 
 rises. He is there all the same, behind it, 
 part of it; and the column of smoke is the 
 incense out of his longing heart that desires 
 Heaven and Earth, and is dowered only with 
 poverty and pain, hunger and weariness, a 
 little isle of the seas, a great hope, and the 
 love of love. 
 
 129
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 XXX 
 
 But ... to the island-story once more ! 
 
 Some day, surely, the historian of lona will 
 appear. I have before me a little book about 
 lona, written by the one man who better 
 than any other might be expected to tell us 
 not about lona, which many could do, but of 
 lona, which few can do. But MacCailein 
 Mbr has not given us what we would so 
 gladly have had from him. I do not say this 
 in reproach, for a book is to be judged by its 
 fulfilment of aim and not by what it foregoes. 
 As a little volume to tell the visitor about 
 lona, the Duke's book is excellent. It is a 
 matter of regret only that he, in whose over- 
 lordship the island is, did not care also to 
 write ^lona. 
 
 How many " history-books " there are like 
 that! Dead leaves. The simile is a travesty. 
 There is no little russet leaf of the forest that 
 could not carry more real, more intimate 
 knowledge. There is no leaf that could not 
 reveal mystery of form, mystery of colour, 
 wonder of structure, secret of growth, the law 
 of harmony ; that could not testify to birth, 
 and change, and decay, and death ; and what 
 history tells us more? — that could not, to 
 the inward ear, bring the sound of the south 
 wind making a greenness in the woods of 
 
 130
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 Spring, the west wind calling his brown and 
 red flocks to the fold. 
 
 But why do I speak of the Duke of 
 Argyll's " lona " ? Only because so splendid 
 an opportunity was lost. He of all men 
 should not have fallen short of it, and per- 
 haps he or one of his people will yet give us 
 what we await. 
 
 I do not overlook the admirable works 
 written on the Columban Church, on the 
 Culdees of lona, on its archaeological remains, 
 on every period of its ecclesiastical history : 
 from Dr. Skene's to that of the latest histo- 
 rian of the Celtic Church. But these are all 
 chapters often invaluable and all profoundly 
 interesting for the one historian to take up, 
 and put down to relate in a new way, that 
 shall be the one way. 
 
 What a book it will be I It will reveal to 
 us the secret of what Oisln sang, what 
 Merlin knew, what Columba dreamed, what 
 Adamnan hoped : what this little " lamp of 
 Christ " was to pagan Europe ; what incense 
 of testimony it flung upon the winds; what 
 saints and heroes went out of it ; how the 
 dust of kings and princes was brought there 
 to mingle with its sands ; how the noble and 
 the ignoble came to it across long seas 
 and perilous countries. It will tell, too, how 
 the Danes ravaged the isles of the west, and 
 
 i3»
 
 THE ISLE OF DREAMS 
 
 left not only their seed for the strengthening 
 of an older race, but imageries and words, 
 words and imageries so alive to-day that the 
 listener in the mind may hear the crys of 
 the viking above the voice of the Gael and 
 the more ancient tongue of the Pict. It will 
 tell, too, how the nettle came to shed her 
 snow above kings' heads, and the thistle to 
 wave where bishops' mitres stood ; how a 
 simple people out of the hills and moors, 
 remembering ancient wisdom or blindly 
 cherishing forgotten symbols, sought here 
 the fount of youth ; and how, slowly, a long 
 sleep fell upon the island, and only the 
 grasses shaken in the wind, and the wind 
 itself, and the broken shadows of dreams in 
 the minds of the old, held the secret of lona. 
 And, at the last — with what lift, with what 
 joy — it will tell how once more the doves 
 of hope and peace have passed over its 
 white sands, this little holy land I This 
 little holy land 1 Ah, white doves, come 
 again ! A thousand thousand wait. 
 
 ^^
 
 PRINTED BY 
 GEORGE D. LORING 
 'PORTLAND 
 tMAINE
 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST 
 STAMPED BELOW. 
 
 Series 9482
 
 3 1205 00344 2843 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A A 001 423 996