Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/166

142 in East Fifeshire and utilised it in interviewing my living subjects."

While holidaying at Stonehaven one summer I had the good fortune to fall in with a most interesting specimen of the countryman of the olden time, unspoilt by town, by school I might almost say, and certainly by college and books. He was a Mr. Ross, and was spending the autumn of his days with his son, who had the leading photographic studio in Stonehaven. For fifty years and over he had lived amid rural surroundings, and not only had much to communicate but took a real pleasure in communicating it. The delights of reminiscence, to one even moderately endowed with imagination, are a real compensation for declining age and powers. What I gathered from this observant and intelligent informant I have amplified from my own stores. His native district of Morayshire lay in the western comer of that north-eastern shoulder of Scotland which is, philologically, perhaps the most interesting in the country, surrounded as it is by the Celtic west and the North-Anglian south, and ever open to the influx of the hardy Norsemen who came on the wings of the snell Nor-easter, The Celtic elements are extremely, but quite accountably, few, but the Norse abound, and therefore I have made ample use of such material as lies to hand in Edmonston's “Dictionary for Orkney and Shetland,” and, still more largely, in the late Dr. Grigor's “Glossary of the Buchan Dialect.” To these I add the two volumes on the “Dialect of Cumberland," a labour of love on the part of three dalesmen and excellent philologists, Messrs. W. Dickinson, S. Dickson Brown, and Dr. E. W. Prevost. Theirs is quite a model of what Dialect Glossaries ought to be. The interest of these volumes in this connection lies in the fact that the dales, through the Solway and Irish Sea, offered a welcome home to the Norsemen. For the Scottish side of this Norse influence I have also used the glossary in Shaw's "Country Schoolmaster,” a Nithsdale observer. Including my own native Fife, therefore, on its coast side, my survey embraces all the Norse influences ever brought in Scotland to blend with the older North-Anglian, excluding those on the Western Isles, the effect of which last on the native Celtic was neither extensive nor persistent.