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"Come, come," he went on, "will you dare tell me that the sheiling singers on Loch Finneside have never heard my 'Harp of the Trees'? If there's a finer song of its kind in all Albainn I've yet to learn it." "If I heard it," said John, "I've forgotten it."
Macpherson added that he told his tale to none of the people with him in the sheiling, but that Isobel McHardie assured him she 'saw such a vision'. Isobel, in whose service Macpherson had been, deponed that, while she lay at one end of the sheiling and Macpherson at the other, 'she saw something naked come in at the door, which frighted her so much that she drew the clothes over her head'. Next day she asked Macpherson what it was, and he replied 'she might be easy, for that it would not trouble them any more'.
For example, three shepherds at a lonely sheiling were discoursing of their loves, and it was, "Oh, how happy I should be if Katie were here, or Maggie, or Bessie!" as the case might be. So they would say and so they would wish, and lo! one evening, the three girls came to the door of the hut.
"Hamish," Macleod said, quickly, "do as I tell you now! Lower the gig; take the men with you, and Christina, and go ashore, and remain in the sheiling till the morning." "I will not!" Hamish cried. "Oh, Sir Keith, would you have me do that?" Macleod had anticipated his refusal. Instantly he went forward and called up Christina. He ordered Duncan Cameron and John Cameron to lower away the gig.
A house from which agreeable guests have just taken departure is rarely cheerful. The reverse, if these have been very agreeable especially on the first evening after. The rude sheiling which gives shelter to the refugees is no exception. Everyone under its roof is afflicted with low spirits, some of them sad two particularly so.
'I was with good folk, in a shepherd's sheiling, replied Anne. 'Ay, ay. Out on the north hill, methinks. 'Nay. Beyond Deadman's Pool, said Anne. 'By Blackreed Moss. That was where the pony fell. 'Blackreed Moss! That moor belongs to the De Vescis, the blackest Lancaster fellow of all! His daughter is the widow of the red-handed Clifford, who slew young Earl Edmund on Wakefield Bridge.
None of these criticisms ever came to the ears of the parties concerned: they never do, you know. Besides the lovers seemed to be infatuated with each other, and the shepherd seemed to be blind to what was going on in his sheiling. To be sure, he was out all day with his sheep, while his lass was alone in the sheiling.
Later, the harvest-home and the dance in green or barn when I was at almost my man's height, with the pluck to put a bare lip to its apprenticeship on a woman's cheek; the songs at ceilidh fires, the telling of sgeulachdan and fairy tales up on the mountain sheiling "Let me see," said I; "when I went abroad, were not you and one of the Glenaora Campbells chief?"
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