The Heart of ScotlandMoncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
History
The Heart of Scotland
Moncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
Perthshire (Scotland) -- Description and travel
Many are the stories told, in print or tradition, of the Macnab’s
sayings and doings. Mr. Drummond states that the library at Taymouth
Castle contained two scrapbooks filled with them, cut out of
publications like the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ and the _Literary Gazette_.
The most often told of these stories relates to a time when the
spendthrift laird was at last falling into the toils of law, whose
minions he looked on as very sons of the devil. The Perth men of
business, it is said, showed indulgence to his shortcomings; but a bill
of his having come into the hands of some less considerate creditor at
Stirling, a clerk, accompanied by two messengers-at-arms, ventured to
his house in Breadalbane on the perilous errand of taking the Macnab
into custody. Getting wind of their design, he kept out of the way, and
left his housekeeper schooled to play a cunning part. She welcomed the
visitors, let them understand that the laird was expected home next
morning, and after hospitable entertainment, sent them to bed, the clerk
at one end of the house and the legal myrmidons at the other. When they
awoke next morning, they were horrified to see dangling from a tree
outside what seemed the body of their companion. They quickly took to
flight on hearing from the housekeeper, as matter of course, that “a bit
clerk body had been hanged, who came here to deave the laird for
siller.” The clerk, whose greatcoat and boots had been borrowed to rig
out a stuffed figure, was not less terrified by the explanation of their
absence: “The laird’s gillies have taken them awa’ to be drooned in the
pool of Crianlarich, and they’ll be back for _you_ the noo.” That set
the clerk to flight in turn; and never again, goes the story, would
anyone venture to serve a legal process on the Macnab in his own
country.
Naturally such a personage did not thrive in his quarrel with the age;
and when he died in 1816, what was left of the Macnab property passed
into the hands of his kinsman and creditor, Lord Breadalbane, to whom
the laird had stooped his pride to become a sort of humoured hanger-on.
His nephew, heir to a load of debt, was fain to emigrate to Canada with
a following of the broken clan. But all over Britain a sprinkling of
Macnabs are found more or less flourishing, who have formed an
association, two or three hundred strong, that takes on itself the pious
duty of tending those ancestral graves at Killin, the chieftains buried
in a central square, their humbler clansmen and connections lying round
about them under the shade of funereal pine-trees. Killin has also to
show a lonely stone, taken to mark the tomb of Fingal, which is said to
have given the original name, _Kilfin_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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