Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/307

 Rh iron ring at one end through which a thong could be passed. Used in this way it would have served much the same purpose as hand-cuffs. I looked with interest on an old Highland spinning-wheel, the gift of my intelligent and friendly guide, Mr. Angus Black. It had belonged to his grandmother. He had given it, he said, "to be kept there as a present for ages and generations to come." When a little before I drank water from "the well by the river side," such was the name of the spring in Gaelic, he told me that it was the spring "whence the Lairds had drunk for ages and generations past." One thing I in vain looked for in the Museum. Boswell had been told much of a war-saddle, on which Lochbuy, "that reputed Don Quixote, used to be mounted; but we did not see it," he adds, "for the young Laird had applied it to a less noble purpose, having taken it to Falkirk Fair with a drove of black cattle." He took it much farther—to America, whither he went with his regiment. There he lost his life in a duel, and it was lost too. Perhaps it is preserved as a curiosity in some collection on the other side of the Atlantic.

I was shown also at a short distance eastwards from the Castle, at the bottom of a crag by the roadside, a place known as the Cheese Cave. Here at every funeral the refreshments used to be placed for the mourners, who had often come twenty miles across the hills. In former days, when there were more men and fewer sheep some hundreds would assemble. "Two old respectable friends were left behind to take care of the food and drink. When the people came back from the grave-yard they refreshed themselves. I have seen them," continued my guide, "sitting on these rocks by the cave having their luncheon." Ramsay of Ochtertyre tells how "the women of each valley through which the funeral passed joined in the procession, but they attended but part of the way and then returned. The whole company seemed to be running; and wherever they rested small cairns or heaps of stones were raised to commemorate the corpse having halted on that spot." These heaps were pointed out to us on the side of Rattachan as we drove down to Glenelg. The silence of the Scotch funeral shocked Wesley, who recorded on May 20, 1774: "When I see in Scotland a coffin put into the earth and covered up without a word spoken, it reminds me of what was spoken concerning Jehoiakin, 'He shall be buried with the burial of an ass.'"