Thus the song, “An Talla ’m bu ghna le Mac Leoid,” was produced extempore during the last illness of one of the lairds. Happening to ask Mary facetiously what kind of a lament she would make for him after he was gone, she declared in response that it would be a very mournful one. “Come nearer me,” said the aged chief, “and let me hear part of it,” whereupon the clever bardess sang this pathetic dirge. The power of extemporising poetical compositions still lingers in the Highlands. Again, “Hithill, uthill agus hò,” owes its existence to the gift of a snuff-mull bestowed on Mary by a son of Sir Norman. All her barderie, however, did not suit the proud chief of Dunvegan, who objected to the scope of the publicity he and his menage received at the hands of the family nurse, exercising, as she freely did, the privileges of the poet. And therefore he banished her to the island of Mull, under the care of a relative. But if one song sent her away, another brought her back. It was hard to be exiled from Eilean-a-Cheo, and the castled seat of the clan, and so seizing the opportunity which the advent of the young laird’s birthday offered, she composed the now well-known “Luinneag Mhic Leoid,” or “Ode to Macleod,” in which she presented a portrait so flattering that the stubborn chief relented and sent a boat to bring her back, on condition that henceforth she should no more exercise her gift of song. The delighted poetess readily assented. Yet even on the way from Mull to Skye she could not restrain the poetic afflatus, and though for a time after her return she kept her word, as Blackie says, “a bird is a bird and will sing”; and Mary Macleod, this irrepressible daughter of the red-haired clansman, once more incurred the displeasure of her chief by composing a new poem on the recovery of his son from some illness; and in extenuation of the charge laid against her, she naively maintained, “It is not a song; it is only a crònan,” that is, a crooning. The ode she produced in Mull in the days of dreary exile is one of the finest of her poems; wild and beautiful, with a very peculiar charm. It generally appears in all the best collections of Gaelic songs, and has been translated into English verse both by Pattison and Blackie. The rendering of the latter is, perhaps, the more euphonious, and brings out better the repetition at the beginning of each stanza, as:— I sit on a knoll, All sorrowful and sad, And I look on the grey sea In mistiness clad, And I brood on strange chances That drifted me here, Where Scarba and Jura And Islay are near.