To speak Gaelic, however, without making slips in the pronunciation is difficult. Some of the sounds are hard for Saxon tongues to accomplish, and unless they are accurately given, the uneducated peasant has often too little imagination to divine the word that is intended. Thus, a lady whom I knew on the west side of Cantyre, told me that when she first came to live there, being a stranger to Highland manners and customs, she was desirous at every turn, to increase her knowledge of them. One day she asked her cook, a thorough Highlander, ‘Kate, what is a philabeg?’ ‘A what, mam!’ ‘A philabeg; I know it’s a part of a man’s Highland dress.’ ‘Och, mam, I wass never hearin’ of it at all.’ Some time afterwards, having meanwhile ascertained what the word signifies, she happened to come into the kitchen when a Highlander in full costume was standing there. ‘Oh Kate, I asked you not long ago to tell me what is a philabeg, and you said you had never heard of it. There’s a philabeg,’ said she, pointing to the man’s kilt. ‘That, mam! of course, I know that very well, I’m sure. If you’ll said pheelabeg, I would be knowin’ at once what you wass askin’ about. I’ve knew what is a pheelabeg ever since I wass born.’ [Sidenote: DIFFICULTIES OF GAELIC] It seems hardly possible for a lowlander, unless he begins early in life and has abundant practice, to lose all ‘taste of the English’ in his Gaelic talk. Thus a pre-Disruption minister with whom I was well acquainted in Argyleshire, and who was not a native Celt, but had learnt Gaelic in his youth, made mistakes in the language up to the end of his long life. One of his co-presbyters so highly appreciated humour that some of the stories he told of my old friend were suspected to be more or less touched up by the narrator. And many were the stories thus circulated through the Synod of Argyle. One of them, I remember, referred to a Gaelic sermon of the minister’s in which he meant to tell his hearers that they were all _peacach caillte_, that is, lost sinners; but as pronounced by him the words sounded like _pucach saillte_, which means ‘salted cuddies’ or coal-fish. On another occasion, being in a hurry to start from a distant inn, he called the waiting-maid, wishing to desire her to have the saddle put to his horse. The Gaelic word for a saddle is _Diollaidich_, and he got the first half of it only, which makes a word with a very different meaning, so that what he did say was, ‘put the devil (_diabhol_) on the horse.’