English literature -- Scottish authors; Scottish literature
Bride could bear no longer the mystery of this great love. It moved her
to an ecstasy. What tenderness of divine love that could thus redeem the
world daily: what long-suffering for all the evil and cruelty done
hourly upon the weeping earth: what patience with the bitterness of the
blind fates! The beauty of the worship of Be'al was upon her as a golden
glory. Her heart leaped to a song that could not be sung.
Bowing her head, so that the tears fell upon her hands, she rose and
moved away.
Elsewhere I have told how a good man of Iona sailed along the coast one
Sabbath afternoon with the Holy Book, and put the Word upon the seals of
Soa: and, in another tale, how a lonely man fought with a sea-woman
that was a seal; as, again, how two fishermen strove with the sea-witch
of Earraid: and, in "The Dan-nan-Ron," of a man who went mad with the
sea-madness, because of the seal-blood that was in his veins, he being a
MacOdrum of Uist, and one of the Sliochd nan Ron, the Tribe of the Seal.
And those who have read the tale, twice printed, once as "The Annir
Choille," and again as "Cathal of the Woods," will remember how, at the
end, the good hermit Molios, when near death in his sea-cave of Arran,
called the seals to come out of the wave and listen to him, so that he
might tell them the white story of Christ; and how in the moonshine,
with the flowing tide stealing from his feet to his knees, the old saint
preached the gospel of love, while the seals crouched upon the rocks,
with their brown eyes filled with glad tears: and how, before his death
at dawn, he was comforted by hearing them splashing to and fro in the
moon-dazzle, and calling one to the other, "We, too, are of the sons of
God."
What has so often been written about is a reflection of what is in the
mind: and though stories of the seals may be heard from the Rhinns of
Islay to the Seven Hunters (and I first heard that of the MacOdrums, the
seal-folk, from a Uist man), I think that it was because of what I
heard of the sea-people on Iona, when I was a child, that they have been
so much with me in remembrance.
In the short tale of the Moon-child, I told how two seals that had been
wronged by a curse which had been put upon them by Columba, forgave the
saint, and gave him a sore-won peace. I recall another (unpublished)
tale, where a seal called Domnhuil Dhu--a name of evil omen--was heard
laughing one Hallowe'en on the rocks below the ruined abbey, and calling
to the creatures of the sea that God was dead: and how the man who heard
him laughed, and was therewith stricken with paralysis, and so fell
sidelong from the rocks into the deep wave, and was afterwards found
beaten as with hammers and shredded as with sharp fangs.
But, as most characteristic, I would rather tell here the story of Black
Angus, though the longer tale of which it forms a part has been printed
before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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