on the _cradhshlat_, a bitter ignominious torture used by the ancient Gaels. When, in good fellowship, one man says to another, _Tha, a laochain_ (yes, my dear fellow), he recalls Fionn and the chivalry of eld, for _laochan_ is merely a contraction for laoch-Fhinn, meaning a companion in war, a hero, literally Fionn's right-hand man in battle. To this day, women, accompanying a marching regiment, are sometimes heard to say in the Gaelic, "We are going with the dear souls to the wars"--literally an echo of the Ossianic _Siubhlaidh sinn le'n anam do'n araich_, "We shall accompany their souls to the battle-field." A thousand instances could be adduced. The language is a herring-net, through which the unchanging sea filtrates, even though the net be clogged with the fish of the hour. Nor is it the pagan atmosphere only that survives: often we breathe the air of that early day when the mind of man was attuned to a beautiful piety that was wrought into nature itself. Of the several words for the dawn, there is a beautiful one, _Uinneagachadh_. We have it in the phrase _'nuair a bha an latha ag uinneagachadh_, "when the day began to dawn." Now this word is simply an extension of _Uinneag_, a window: and the application of the image dates far back to the days of St. Columba, when some devout and poetic soul spoke of the _uinneagan Neimh_, the windows of Heaven. [1] Oh, alas, alas! (Literally, Oh, my undoing, or Oh, my utter ruin.) [2] Alas my torment! Sometimes, among the innumerable "legendary moralities" which exist fragmentarily in the West Highlands and in the Isles, there is a coherent narrative basis--as, for example, in the Irish and Highland folk-lore about St. Bride, or Bridget, "Muime Chriosd." Sometimes there is simply a phrase survived out of antiquity. I doubt if any now living, either in the Hebrides or in Ireland, has heard any legend of the "Washer of the Ford." The name survives, with its atmosphere of a remote past, its dim ancestral memory of a shadowy figure of awe haunting a shadowy stream in a shadowy land. Samuel Ferguson, in _Congal_, has done little more than limn an obscure shadow of that shadow: yet it haunts the imagination. In the passage of paganism, these old myths were too deep-rooted in the Celtic mind to vanish at the bidding of the Cross: thus came about that strange grafting of the symbolic imagery of the devout Culdee, of the visionary Mariolater, upon the surviving Druidic and prehistoric imagination. In a word, the Washer of the Ford might well have appeared, to a single generation, now as a terrible and sombre pagan goddess of death, now as a symbolic figure in the new faith, foreshadowing spiritual salvation and the mystery of resurrection.