The glimpses of Highland life he gives in connection with his visits and colloquies with the people are highly interesting. “Whatever be the value of this work,” he says, “it is genuine folk-lore, taken down from the lips of men and women, no part being copied from books. It is the product of far-away thinking, come down on the long stream of time. Who the thinkers and whence the stream, who can tell? Some of the hymns may have been composed within the cloistered cells of Deny and Iona, and some of the incantations among the cromlechs of Stonehenge and the standing stones of Callarnis. These poems were composed by the learned, but they have not come down through the learned, but through the unlearned—not through the lettered few, but through the unlettered many, through the crofters and cottars, the herdsmen and shepherds of the Highlands and Islands.” “The poems were generally intoned in a low, recitative manner, rising and falling in slow modulated cadences, charming to hear but difficult to follow. The music of the hymns had a distinct individuality, in some respects resembling and in many respects differing from the old Gregorian chants of the Church. I greatly regret that I was not able to record this peculiar and beautiful music, probably the music of the old Celtic Church.” Following the advice and example of his acquaintance, J. F. Campbell of Islay, whom he knew for a quarter of a century, Mr. Carmichael gives the words and names of the reciters. But, unlike Campbell and Mackenzie and Sinclair, he gives an English rendering of the original in every instance. Thus, while to the vast majority of this nation _their_ felicitous poems are locked up in the Gaelic, _his_ are available to all, in chaste and beautiful language, with charming letterpress, embellished by old Celtic letters, artistically copied by his wife from the ancient MSS. in Edinburgh and elsewhere. Speaking of the original, he maintains that, although in decay, the poems are in verse of a high order, with metre, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, and every quality to please the ear and to instruct the mind. Simple dignity, charming grace, passionate devotion, characterise most of these pieces. Again and again he laid down his self-imposed task, feeling unable to render the intense power and supreme beauty of the original Gaelic into adequate English; but he persevered, thus placing a stone as it were upon the cairn of those who composed and of those who transmitted the work. And now, a few characteristic specimens from the book may fitly close this study. The first is an incantation beginning:— The wicked who would do me harm, May he take the (throat) disease Globularly, spirally, circularly, Fluxy, pellety, horny-grim, etc. But scarcely any English can convey the vengeance of the vernacular. Even the sounds are terrifying:—