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'They knows nothin' an' they fears nothin'," he quoted, smiling. "The personal element comes in more, I suppose, in those craft," said Sir William musingly. He focused his glasses on a turf cabin ashore. "The Admiral was telling me that a London brain specialist was born in one of those crofter's huts." The Submarine Commander nodded. "It's not unlikely," he said.
But the Royal Commissioners say that the crofter's habitation is usually "of a character that would imply physical and moral degradation in the eyes of those who do not know how much decency, courtesy, virtue, and even refinement survive amidst the sordid surroundings of a Highland hovel."
Far away, at the foot of the hills a crofter's cow lowed lazily, calling forth a summons to be taken in and relieved of its burden of milk. The sheep came nearer to the "bughts," and the lambs burrowed for nourishment, with tails wagging, as they drew their sustenance, prodding and punching the patient mothers in the operation of feeding.
"You could live at the Ritz or Waldorf a good deal cheaper than in some of these crofter's cottages. You see, until the War began they never let anything in their lives. No one ever wanted to come and live here. Of course, there are nice women like your Miss McCallum, for example who won't take advantage of the enormous demand, and stick to reasonable prices. More honour to them!
No fiction, said Father Grant, himself a crofter's son, could be more absurd than this. It was absolutely disproved, he said, by a mass of medieval charters, in which were assigned to the chieftains by the Scottish Crown the fullest territorial rights possible for lawyers to devise.
Would you think me an interloper you and the other grand MacDonalds if I, the crofter's boy, should develop an ambition like Sir Walter's oh, not so worthy or splendid, because I'm neither worthy nor splendid if I should wish to have the great house of the MacDonalds of Dhrum, not let to me for a term of years as it is now, but bought and paid for as my own?" "Can the MacDonalds sell?"
Indeed a new play was always announced as "The Greatest Attraction in Toronto Last Week," and companies had several times come all the way from New York just to appear in Algonquin. Then every winter there were the Topp Brothers who came and stayed a whole week in Crofter's Hotel, and gave a different play every night.
Miss White had worked herself up to a pretty pitch of contemptuous indignation; her father was almost beginning to believe that it was real. "It is all very well for the Macleods to interest themselves with these trumpery little local matters. They play the part of grand patron; the people are proud to honor them; it is a condescension when they remember the name of the crofter's youngest boy.
When they approached one of the outlying farms of the Kerrs, Archie halted his band, and, accompanied by four of the stoutest and tallest of their number, went on to the crofter's house. The man came to the door. "What would you, young sir?" he said to Archie. "I would," Archie said, "that you bear a message from me to your lord."
On the day after Christmas Day there was a kind of subscription merrymaking at an enterprising crofter's down in the village; it was to cost two and a half krones a couple for music, sandwiches, and spirits in the middle of the night, and coffee toward morning. Gustav and Bodil were going.
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