CHAPTER XIV INVERNESS: THE CAPITAL OF THE HIGHLANDS One of the first things we noticed in this summer capital of the Highlands was a male being, whom Thackeray would have liked to cage for his “Book of Snobs.” From the monocle, or window in his eye, and from certain physical peculiarities, and even pronunciation in his speech, which he was helpless to conceal, I should imagine that he was really a London cockney masquerading in a Highlander’s costume. According to the fad or fashion of vacation time, and appropriate for hot weather, he was encased in the complete pavonine dress of the old days of clans and claymores, but the motor within hardly suited the machine. With his buckled shoes, checkered leggings,--in the side of one of which was stuck a long dirk, having a silver handle holding a Cairngorm stone set in the top,--with considerable public exposure of the cuticle around and above his skinny knees, with gay kilts, decorated pouch, shoulder-brooch of silver, coat, plaid, bonnet, and feather, the pageant of costume seemed vastly more imposing than the man within. This creature seemed a walking museum of Scottish antiquities. All his unwonted paraphernalia, however, did not cure his gawkiness or prevent impending disaster to his pride. In trying to pass by some baskets belonging to a huckster, and full, if I remember aright, of turnips, his dirk-handle caught in the end of a loose hoop. “Oh, what a fall was there, my countrymen!” In a moment one would have taken him for a measuring-rod. At least six feet of the gawk, more or less, lay on the soil of what may have been his beloved native land. Nevertheless, in all Christian charity, we tried our best to appear blind, and resisted the temptation to laugh. I am bound to say, however, that I saw some solid-looking citizens of Inverness wear the kilt and Highland coat most gracefully. Moreover, in the evening, when some of the Gordon Highlanders,--I believe they were,--whose barracks were not far away, rambled through the streets, they certainly showed that the man and the clothes had grown together. One could easily see how well adapted was such a dress to a rough campaign in a mountainous country. One scarcely wondered why, when fighting in hilly regions, the Highlander was usually the superior of the average infantryman. Nevertheless, some comical chapters in eighteenth-century American history come into mind. When we remembered that modern footgear was strange to men who had been used to the ancient brogues and to whom the proverb “as easy as an old shoe” was a novelty, the story is quite credible that, in the repulse by the French of the attack made by the British army under Abercrombie at Ticonderoga, in 1758, when the Highlanders were forced to retreat from Fort Carillon, there were thousands of shoes left stuck in the mud when the British ran to their boats.