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Updated: June 24, 2025
"Yus," he repeated the word very slowly, "and take another glass, and leave it alone." "What did you say?" enquired Mr. Crofter, a little puzzled. "I don't think I quite caught you, Mr. McPherson." "I would be thinking," said Jock with dreadful deliberation, "that it must be a grand sight, but I nuffer saw one." "Never saw what?" "A man that could take a glass and leave it alone.
The poverty of the crofter often renders his condition deplorable. His holding and right of common have been curtailed by the landlord, or he has sub-divided them among his sons or kinsmen, until it would be impossible for the produce of the soil to sustain the population, even if no rent whatever were charged.
English landlordism, imposed from without upon the crofter of Skye or the rack-rented tenant of a Connemara hillside, has never crushed out the native feeling of a right to the soil, the native resistance to an alien system. The south-east, I assert, has been brutalised into acquiescent serfdom by a long course of feudalism; the west and north still retain the instincts of freemen.
But he makes no claim to own it. Against the wishes of even the humblest crofter, the King would not, because he knows he could not, enter his cottage. Nor can we imagine even Kaiser William going into the palm-leaf hut of a charcoal-burner in German East Africa and saying: "This is my palm-leaf hut. This is my charcoal. You must not sell it to the English, or the French, or the American.
And perhaps that is why I did it. You are right. I haven't acted the part of a gentleman all through this miserable business. But what could you expect? For you see, my father worked his own way up, and my grandfather was a crofter and I haven't got the blood of Irish kings, on the other side, behind me. Now I'm being nasty, as you used to say in the old Bungroopim days when I wouldn't play.
Besides, the crofter, or one of his ancestors, has in most cases built the house and made other improvements: sometimes he has reclaimed the land itself and changed a barren waste into a garden. The labor and money which he and his ancestors have expended in improving the place seem to him to give him an additional right to occupy it always.
We thought they'd be snowed up all quiet and comfy, but Burden, their C. O., got wind of our coming, and sent spies in to Eschol." "Confound him," said Luttrell, who was fat and well-liking. "I entertained one of 'em in a red worsted comforter under Bean Derig. He said he was a crofter. 'Gave him a drink too."
"Well, if needs must, it must," the crofter said; "and I will do your bidding, young sir partly because I care not to see my house in ruins, but more because I have heard of you as a valiant youth who fought stoutly by the side of Wallace at Lanark and Ayr though, seeing that you are but a lad, I marvel much that you should be able to hold your own in such wild company.
So just name it and you'll get it." "We're needing none o' your anchors," said the crofter in a matter-of-fact tone as he climbed up the schooner's side, "but I just mind now, Mary Seater lost her last needle a week syne, and we have but twa needles in all Rackwick, so thoo'd better gie us a penny's worth."
Under the old clan system, to which the crofter is accustomed to trace his claims, the land was owned by the chief and clansmen in common, and allotments and reallotments were made from time to time to individual clansmen, each of whom had a right to some portion of the land, while the commons were very extensive.
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