Page:The Celtic Review volume 4.djvu/361

 sh

In two instances sh has become ch in Arran. Car mu chlios, upside down (of clothes), is obviously for car mu shlios. ‘All Fools’ Day' is there La chealg na cuthaige, sometimes La cheal’ na cuthaige, and is to be explained as La shealg na cuthaige, lit. Hunting of the cuckoo day, or in broad Scots ‘Hunt-the-gowk day.’

SEA-POEMS

(Continued from p. 249)

VII

TEACHD LEÒID

In the Macleod country, Skye, there lived for many generations a family locally known as Clann a’ Chomhairlich, ‘the Counsellor’s Family,’ whose boast it was that ‘they had never lost any poetry or tradition, but were ever adding to the cairn’—cha do chaill iad bàrdachd no beul-aithris riamh, ach a’ sior-chur ria a’ chàrn. Early in the nineteenth century this family began to break up; several of its members removed to other parts of the Hebrides, many emigrated to the Colonies, and hardly any of the old stock were left in the Macleod country. In the dispersion and in the struggle for existence amid new surroundings, the old ballads and the folklore were mostly forgotten—a sad falling-away from the wisdom which had earned for the founder of the family the name of ‘counsellor’! Fortunately, however, the whole of their interesting literary heritage has not been lost; some ninety years ago, one of the family, Kenneth Macleod, carried a good deal of it to Trotternish, in the north end of Skye, and his children in their turn (especially his daughter Janet) handed down many fragments to a