Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/56

 44 More Folklore from the Hebrides.

soon learns to accept in South Uist, the land of cold mist and sweeping winds, and damp, and draughts, and rain, where even the nether regions with a fire in them have a suggestion of comfort. Hell is therefore discouragingly known as " the place of the wind of the cold passages, or the wind of the cold channels."

The Aurora Borealis is called in Gaelic the Firchlis- neach or " the darting ones ; " and when the lights are seen flashing about the sky they are fighting among themselves, and their blood is found upon the rocks in the form of a lichen known as " the blood of the darting ones." Their history is, that when the angels were falling out of heaven, Saint Michael noticed that heaven would soon be emptied of its inhabitants, and God ordered that the contest should cease, and everything remain as it was at the moment ; so those that fell on the earth or on the rocks or into the pit remained there, and those that were falling from the sky stayed where they were. Those that fell among the rocks we hear sometimes as Echo (called in Gaelic the Son of the fall of the Rocks), and those who fell upon the earth are the Fairies.

St. Michael is believed to have saved many of the angelic host from joining in the rebellion of Lucifer and the punishment that followed, by throwing holy water over them as they were hastening after him. All who were touched were unable to move, and so stayed where they were and were saved. The epithet min, gentle, is applied to St. Michael, and he is the saint most invoked in South Uist after Our Lady. A bannock specially prepared for his festival, "the size of a quern" in circumference, is called the St. Michael's Cake, Striithan na K eill Micheil. It is kneaded simply with water, and marked across like a scone, dividing it into four equal parts, and then placed in front of the fire resting on a quern. It is not polished with dry meal as is usual in making a cake, but when it is cooked a thin coating of eggs (four in number), mixed with buttermilk, is