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268 "Fiona Macleod" to have been. For all the influence of "Barabal," his nurse, it seems from his writing that her stories remain with him more as suggestions to imagination than as definite memories, and that the fisherman referred to in "Sheumas" left with him little more than "Barabal." How fresh and wonderful to him was actual contact with Highland life is almost pathetically revealed in a letter he wrote to Mrs. Sharp from Kilcreggan in the summer of 1894. In this letter he is all but exultant in the recording of the securing of "Celtic" material from a "Celtic Islesman from Iona." Of the actual life of the Islesmen and Glensmen he could have known but little, for long living among them is necessary to their understanding,—they are, as he wrote in this same letter, "passionately reticent." It was not the way of Sharp to fall back, in this deficiency of experience, on old legends and folk-tales collected in his own day, but to trust to his imagination as that was quickened by what knowledge he had of life in the inner isles and in Argyllshire, and by the very atmosphere of known places there that seemed to demand, as Stevenson put it, to have stories invented to fit them.

It is said, too,—Mrs. Sharp gives her authority to the story,—that friendship with the woman to whom he dedicated "Pharais," "E.W.R.," stimulated him to the work. "Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life, and of her joy of life," writes Mrs. Sharp in her memoir of her husband, "because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and Celtic days, a symbol that,