The same sympathetic observer from whose pages these words are taken has given the following illustrative example of the clerical methods: ‘A famous violin-player died in the island of Eigg a few years ago. He was known for his old-style playing and his old-world airs, which died with him. A preacher denounced him, saying, “Thou art down there behind the door, thou miserable man with thy grey hair, playing thine old fiddle, with the cold hand without, and the devil’s fire within.” His family pressed the man to burn his fiddle and never to play again. A pedlar came round and offered ten shillings for the violin. The instrument had been made by a pupil of Stradivarius, and was famed for its tone. “It was not at all the thing that was got for it,” said the old man, “that grieved my heart so sorely, but the parting with it! the parting with it! and that I myself gave the best cow in my father’s fold for it when I was young.” The voice of the old man faltered, and the tear fell. He was never seen to smile again.’[28] Taught to think their ancient tales foolish and their music and dancing sinful, the people have gradually lost much of the gaiety which with other branches of the Celtic race they once possessed. [Sidenote: HIGHLAND SONGS] One who was familiar with the Highlands in the middle of last century will be struck with the further decay or disappearance of various customs which even then were evidently fading out of use. Of these vanished characteristics, one of the most distinctive, whose loss is most regrettable, was the practice, once universal, of singing Gaelic songs during operations that required a number of men or women, working together, to keep time in their movements. This picturesque usage appears to have died out on the mainland, though it still survives among the Catholic islands of the Outer Hebrides. There were many such songs, each having a marked rhythm, to which it was easy to adjust the motions of the limbs. I have already referred to the boat-songs that kept the rowers in time. Besides these, there were songs for reaping and other labour in the field. Indoors, too, each kind of work, wherein two or more persons had to move in unison, had its music. Thus when two women grind corn with the quern or handmill, as they still do in some of the Outer Isles, they move to the rhythm of a monotonous chant. When they thicken (wauk) homespun cloth, they keep themselves in time by singing--a practice which may also still be heard among the Catholic parts of the Hebrides. I have only once seen the quern in use, but when I first visited Skye, the songs still continued to be sung, though not as accompaniments to concerted movement. In some of the Outer Hebrides milking-songs are still in use, and the cows are said to be so fond of them that in places they will not give their milk without them, nor occasionally without their favourite airs being sung to them.[29] There are likewise herding-songs sung when the flocks are sent out to the