Broadford Fair is a great event in the island. The little town lies on the margin of a curving bay, and under the shadow of a somewhat celebrated hill. On the crest of the hill is a cairn of stones, the burying-place of a Scandinavian woman, tradition informs me, whose wish it was to be laid high up there, that she might sleep right in the pathway of the Norway wind. In a green glen at its base stands the house of Corachatachin, breathing reminiscences of Johnson and Boswell. Broadford is a post town, containing a lime kiln, an inn, and perhaps three dozen houses in all. It is a place of great importance. If Portree is the London of Skye, Broadford is its Manchester. The markets, held four times a year, take place on a patch of moorland, about a mile from the village. Not only are cattle sold, and cash exchanged for the same, but there the Skye farmer meets his relations, from the brother of his blood to his cousin forty times removed. To these meetings he is drawn, not only by his love of coin, but by his love of kindred, and--the _Broadford Mail_ and the _Portree Advertiser_ lying yet in the womb of time--by his love of gossip also. The market is the Skye-man's exchange, his family gathering, and his newspaper. From the deep sea of his solitude he comes up to breathe there, and, refreshed, sinks again. This fair at Broadford I resolved to see. The day before the market the younger M'Ian had driven some forty stirks from the hill, and these, under the charge of John Kelly and his dog, started early in the afternoon that they might be present at the rendezvous about eight o'clock on the following morning, at which hour business generally began. I saw the picturesque troop go past--wildly-beautiful brutes of all colours,--black, red, cream-coloured, dun and tan; all of a height, too, and so finely bred that, but for difference of colour, you could hardly distinguish the one from the other. What a lowing they made! how they tossed their slavering muzzles! how the breaths of each individual brute rose in a separate wreath! how John Kelly shouted and objurgated, and how his dog scoured about! At last the bellowings of the animals--the horde chanting after that fashion their obscure "_Lochaber no more_"--grew fainter and fainter up the glen, and finally on everything the wonted silence settled down. [Sidenote: On the way to the fair.] Next morning before sunrise M'Ian and I followed in a dog-cart. We went along the glen down which Fellowes and I had come; and in the meadows over which, on that occasion, we observed a troop of horses galloping through the mist of evening, I noticed, in the beamless light that preceded sunrise, hay coops by the river side, and an empty cart standing with its scarlet poles in the air. In a field nearer, a couple of male blackcocks with a loud _whirr-rr_ were knocking their pugnacious heads together. Suddenly, above the hill in front the sun