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It was too late to retreat, and Malcolm and Ronald walked boldly to the public house in the centre of the village. The officer at once rose and walked across to him. "Who are you?" he asked; "and where do you come from?" Malcolm shook his head and said in Gaelic: "I do not understand English." "What fools these people are!" the officer exclaimed. "Ho, within there!" The landlady came to the door.
The boats bobbed and nudged each other or strained at the twanging cord as seamen and fishers spanged from deck to deck; rose cries in loud and southward Gaelic or the lowlands of Air. The world was no longer dreaming but stark awake, all but the sea and the lapsing bays and the brown floating hills. Town Inneraora bustled to its marge.
It was a welcome sight, for by this time we were really weary; but alas! the inn was on the other side of the lake, and we had no boat; still, Gilbert felt sure there must be one not very far off, to take the people across, and after surveying the shore for a while he discovered a little pier, with a rowing-boat chained to it, and a very small cottage almost close to where we stood; so he went to knock at the door, and again Gaelic was given in answer.
The Ross, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide nor high, but as rough as God made it to this day; the deep sea on either hand of it, full of rugged isles and reefs most perilous to seamen all overlooked from the eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peak of Ben Kyaw. The Mountain of the Mist, they say the words signify in the Gaelic tongue; and it is well named.
Colin had blessed the viands and gone away; he was a new kind of minister and a surprising one, who had odd views about the drinking customs of the people, and when his coat skirts had disappeared round the corner of the church there was a feeling of relief, and old Baldy Bain, "Copenhagen" as they called him, who was precentor in the Gaelic end of the church, was emboldened to fill his glass up to more generous height than he had ever cared to do in the presence of the clergyman.
The circulation of Gaelic books published under its auspices is over 200,000 a year. In the year 1899 it was taught in 100 Primary Schools, it is now taught in 3,000. The number of people, including adults, learning Irish in evening continuation classes was in 1899 little over 1,000, and is to-day over 100,000. The circumstance that in London on the Sunday nearest St.
Play followed play with great rapidity, and dramatic societies sprang up all over the country, playing home-made productions in Gaelic and English.
It was in vain Robin spent a whole morning, during a walk over Minch Moor, in attempting to teach his companion to utter, with true precision, the shibboleth LLHU, which is the Gaelic for a calf. From Traquair to Murder Cairn, the hill rung with the discordant attempts of the Saxon upon the unmanageable monosyllable, and the heartfelt laugh which followed every failure.
"I wish to God!" he said, with the disordered violence of a shy man, "that there was anny league or society in Ireland that would override class prejudice, and oblitherate religious bigotry!" He had snatched a paragraph from his last address to the Gaelic Leaguers of Cluhir, and with it was betrayed into the pronunciation that mastered him in moments of excitement.
There they sat about their captive in a part of a circle and gazed upon him silently like something dangerous, perhaps a lion or a tiger on the spring. Presently this attention was relaxed. They drew nearer together, fell to speech in the Gaelic, and very cynically divided my property before my eyes.
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