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It had never been more than a domestic arrangement; it could not become a state affair, as among the nations of antiquity. In clannish tribes, therefore, and particularly among the Celts, the personal freedom of the lowest clansman was the rule, deprivation of individual liberty the exception.
"Aren't you just a bit previous? Apt to startle and frighten the lady?" "Oh, go on, go on," Ryder exhorted bitterly. "I like it. It's better than I can do myself. Go on.... But while you are talking trot out your tartans. Something clannish now one of those ancestral rigs that you are always cherishing ... Rich and red, to set off my dark, handsome type."
In most cities the members of the legal profession form a clique, and are very clannish. Each one knows everybody else, and if one member of the bar is assailed, the rest are prompt to defend him. In New York, however, there is no such thing as a legal "fraternity." Each man is wrapped in his own affairs, and knows little and cares less about other members of the profession.
In some families the last rite of each Thanksgiving feast is to discuss this question and settle it then and there for the following year. Conservative and clannish families who live far enough apart so that little quarrels can not be born among them to upset this fixed yearly programme usually do this.
And here we come face to face with a tempting inconsistency. For the whistling spirits are notoriously clannish; I understood them to wait upon and to enlighten kinsfolk only, and that the medium was always of the race of the communicating spirit. Here, then, we have the bonds of the family, on the one hand, severed at the hour of death; on the other, helpfully persisting.
The rural family needs to be taught to be more just and more generous in regard to other families. The clannish spirit ought to pass, for it is without excuse in these days. The family interests a generation ago were altogether too narrowly conceived to make a wholesome social life possible.
We set out together; as we were going along I questioned him about the state of the country, and gathered from him that there was occasionally a good deal of crime in Wales. "Are the Welsh a clannish people?" I demanded. "Very," said he. "As clannish as the Highlanders?" said I. "Yes," said he, "and a good deal more."
This communication had the effect, at first, of raising the merchant's ire; but, upon more deliberate consideration, his wrath gave way to pity for the father, in whom, through the haughtiness of his clannish spirit, he could detect the anguish for a son's loss, and for the young man, whose sudden disappearance had been to him inexplicable, but in whose conduct he discovered the workings of an honourable nature.
My shyness and fear of its strangeness made us both dumb. No doubt I seemed like a new breed of inoffensive little barbarian, knowing no tongue but its own. A certain clannish etiquette made it seem necessary that a relation should pay me a visit sometimes, because I was in a way important.
Her splendid sympathy was the reverse of clannish; it was applied to every mortal who crossed her path. Yes, for all her youth, Polly had quite a character of her own; and even thus early her husband sometimes ran up against a certain native sturdiness of opinion. But this did not displease him; on the contrary, he would have thanked you for a wife who was only an echo of himself.
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