Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Short stories
Besides the huge staring castle, with its lodges, built by the
foreigner, there are only some twenty houses now in all bonnie
Glenalder. Tourists venturing from the main road come, here and there,
across a little heap of stones and the remains of a garden, with some
patches of bright green still visible among the heather. It is the
memorial of a home where generation after generation of well-built,
clean-blooded, God-fearing Highland folk were raised. From those humble
cottages went up morning and evening the psalm of praise to God. From
them also came hardy men to fill the ranks of the Highland regiments,
who had tasted none of the city vices and did not know what fear was.
Nor were they a fierce or morose people, for the Glen sounded of
a summer evening with the sound of the pipes, playing reels and
strathspeys, and in the winter time the minister would lend his barn for
a dance, saying, like the shrewd man he was, “The more dancing the less
drinking.” The very names of those desolate homesteads and the people
that lived therein are now passing out of mind in Glenalder, but away
in North-West Canada there is a new Glenalder, where every name has
been reproduced, and the cuttings of the brier roses bloom every year in
memory of the land that is “far awa.” And if any man from Lochaber, or
for that matter from any part of Scotland, lights on this place, it will
be hard for him to get away from the warm hearts that are there, and he
must depart a better man after hearing the kindly speech and seeing the
sword dance once more.
While the exiles halted on the elbow of the hill, each man, woman and
child, according to his size and strength, carried a stone from the
hillside and placed it on a heap that grew before their eyes, till it
made a rough pyramid. This was called the Cairn of Remembrance, and as
often as any one of the scanty remnant left the Glen to go south it was
a custom that his friends should accompany him to this spot and bid him
farewell, where the past pledged him to love and faithfulness. It was
here therefore that Henry Rutherford parted from Magdalen Macdonald as
he went to his last session at the Divinity Hall.
“It's four years since I came first to Glenalder to teach the school in
the summer-time, Magdalen, an' little I thought then I would ever be so
near the ministry or win my sweetheart in the Glen.” They were sitting
on a heather bank below the cairn, and as he spoke his arm slipped
round her waist He was a typical Scot, with bony frame, broad shoulders,
strong face, deep-set eyes of grey, and the somewhat assertive and
self-sufficient manner of his race. She was of the finest type of
Highland beauty, with an almost perfect Grecian face, fair hair dashed
with gold, eyes of the blue of the Highland lochs, and a queenly
carriage of head and body. Deep-bosomed and unfettered by fashionable
city dress, with strong hand and firm foot, she had the swinging gait
and proud independence of the free hill woman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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