king was a good deal disturbed, and he went to the prophets of Baal, and they said, pretty airy, that if he had an altar ready, they were ready; and they intimated he better get it insured, too.

'So next morning all the children of Israel and their parents and the other people, gathered themselves together to see the match, and bet on it, that is, if they did bet in that old ancient time; and like enough they did,—it's human, you know.

'Well, here was that great crowd of prophets of Baal packed together on one side, and Isaac walking up and down all alone on the other, putting up his job. When time was called, Isaac let on to be comfortable and indifferent; told the other team to take the first innings. So they went at it, the whole four hundred and fifty, praying around the altar, very hopeful, and doing their level best. They prayed an hour,-two hours,-three hours, and so on, plump till noon. It wa'n't any use; they hadn't took a trick. Of course they felt kind of ashamed before all those people, and well they might. Now, what would a magnanimous man do? Keep still, wouldn't he? Of course. What did Isaac do? He gravelled the prophets of Baal every way he could think of. Says he, "You don't speak up loud enough; your god's asleep, like enough, or may be he's taking a walk; you want to holler, you know," or words to that effect; I don't recollect the exact language. Mind, I don't apologise for Isaac; he had his faults.

'Well, the prophets of Baal prayed along the best they knew how all the afternoon, and never raised a spark. At last, about sundown, they were all tuckered out, and they owned up and quit.

'What does Isaac do, now? He steps up and says to some friends of his, there, "Pour four barrels of water on the altar!" Everybody was astonished; for the other side had prayed at it dry, you know, and got whitewashed. They poured it on. Says he, "Heave on four more barrels." Then he says, "Heave on four more." Twelve barrels, you see, altogether. The water ran all over the altar, and all down the sides, and filled up a trench around it that would hold a couple of hogsheads-" measures," it says; I reckon it means about a hogshead. Some of the people were about to put on their things and go, for they allowed he was crazy. They didn't know Isaac. Isaac knelt down and began to pray; he strung along, and strung along, about the heathen in distant lands, and about the sister churches, and about the state and the country at large, and about those that's in authority in the government, and all the usual programme, you know, till everybody had got tired and gone to thinking about something else, and then all of a sudden, when nobody was noticing, he outs with a match and rakes it on the under side of his leg, and pff! up the whole thing blazes

like a house afire! Twelve barrels of water? Water your grandmother! Petroleum, sir, PETROLEUM! that's what it was!'

'Petroleum, captain?'

'Yes, sir; the country was full of it. Isaac knew all about that. You read the Bible. Don't you worry about the tough places. They ain't tough when you come to think them out, and throw light on them. There ain't a thing in the Bible but what is true; all you want is to go prayerfully to work and cipher out how 'twas done.'

At eight o'clock on the third morning out from New York, land was sighted. Away across the sunny waves one saw a faint dark stripe stretched along under the horizon, or pretended to see it, for the credit of his eye-sight. Even the reverend said he saw it, a thing which was manifestly not so. But I never have seen anyone who was morally strong enough to confess that he could not see land when others claimed that they could.

By and by the Bermuda Islands were easily visible. The principal one lay upon the water in the distance, a long, dullcoloured body, scalloped with slight hills and valleys. We could not go straight at it, but had to travel all the way around it, sixteen miles from shore, because it is fenced with an invisible coral reef. At last we sighted buoys, bobbing here and there, and then we glided into a narrow channel among them, raised the reef,' and came upon shoaling blue water that soon further shoaled into pale green, with a surface scarcely rippled. Now came resurrection hour: the berths gave up their dead. Who are these pale spectres in plug hats and silken flounces that file up the companion-way in melancholy procession and step upon the deck? These are they which took the infallible preventive of sea-sickness in New York harbour and then disappeared and were forgotten. Also came two or three faces not seen before until this moment. One's impulse is to ask, 'Where did you come aboard?

We followed the narrow channel a long time, with land on both sides, low hills that might have been green and grassy, but had a faded look instead. However, the land-locked water was lovely, at any rate, with its glittering belts of blue and green where moderate soundings were, and its broad splotches of rich brown where the rocks lay near the surface. Everybody was feeling so well that even the grave, pale young man (who, by a sort of kindly common consent, had come latterly to be referred to as the Ass') received frequent and friendly notice, which was right enough, for there was no harm in him.

6

At last we steamed between two island points whose rocky jaws allowed just barely room enough for the vessel's body, and

now before us loomed Hamilton on her clustered hill-sides and summits, the whitest mass of terraced architecture that exists in the world, perhaps.

It was Sunday afternoon, and on the pier were gathered one or two hundred Bermudians, half of them black, half of them white, and all of them nobbily dressed, as the poet says.

Several boats came off to the ship, bringing citizens. One of these citizens was a faded, diminutive old gentleman, who approached our most ancient passenger with a childlike joy in his twinkling eyes, halted before him, folded his arms, says, smiling with all his might and with all the simple delight that was in him, "You don't know me, John! Come, out with it, now; you know you don't!'

The ancient passenger scanned him perplexedly, scanned the napless, threadbare costume of venerable fashion that had done Sunday-service no man knows how many years, contemplated the marvellous stove-pipe hat of still more ancient and venerable pattern, with its poor pathetic old stiff brim canted up 'gallusly' in the wrong places, then said, with a hesitation that indicated strong internal effort to place' the gentle old apparition, Why let me see plague on it. . . there's something about you that . . . er er... but I've been gone from Bermuda for twenty-seven years, and . . . hum, hum . . . I don't seem to get at it, somehow, but there's something about you that is just as familiar to me as

...

...

...

'Likely it might be his hat,' murmured the Ass, with innocent, sympathetic interest.

59

The Fairy-Man and the Lady of the Rock.

BY CUTHBERT BEDE.

THE fairies had always a great taste for beauty in mortals, and were ever on the look-out for lovely maidens, with the intent, if possible, to carry them off and to make them their own. A WestHighlander told me of a water-kelpie (Ech Uisque) who shared in this fairy failing, and persuaded a maiden to come and look at his coral cave beneath the sea. When she had gratified her curiosity, she desired to return to her own home and her own lover; and when the kelpie requested that she would remain with him and be his wife, she told him that she could not do so until she had got her spinning-wheel. He trusted to her word, and took her up through the waves, and conducted her to that part of the sea-shore where he had first seen her walking. Soon after her lover found her lying there in a swoon; so he took her home, and she told him of the kelpie. After they were married they found three trout placed outside their door, every morning—a daily gift from the kelpie for their breakfast.

This incident of the trout figures in another story that was told to me in Cantire. There was once a kelpie who lived in an inland lake, and carried on an intrigue with a beauteous maiden. She bore him a son; but, repenting of her acquaintance with the Leannan Shee, or fairy-lover, she desired to leave him, and requested that he would take their child into his own charge. But the kelpie would not do this; and to make his refusal the more acceptable to her he qualified it with a bribe. He said to herMo nighean cruin don, gabh ri'd bhacan, S'bheir mise dhuitse gad breachdan:

which signifies

Maiden, deck'd with auburn tresses,
Take thy son to thy embraces;

And each morning whilst I live
Spotted trout to thee I'll give.

Either the trout or the maternal feelings prevailed; the young mother took her son, and reared him as requested, calling him by the name of Dusith, which means the Fairy-man.'

Whatever may have been the history of the birth of Dusith, he grew up to be a remarkable character. Of his personal appearance we may form some idea from his nickname Shigach, the Dwarf,'

by which he is still spoken of in Cantire. His surname is variously given as Mac Gillie-hean, and Mac Ambhlay. One tradition makes him to have come from Mull, and to have been an expert archer, and not altogether ignorant of the black art. He became famous in Cantire history as the slayer of Sir Lachlan Mor Maclean of Duart, who was the foe of his nephew, Sir James Macdonald, Lord of Islay and Cantire, at the battle of Traigh Gruinart (or Loch Gruinart), in Islay, on August 5, 1598; and the drama in which the Fairy-man played so conspicuous a part very forcibly illustrates the stirring incidents of those family wars in which the lords of the isles and the Western Highland chieftains were so ready to plunge themselves and their clans. The full details spread over so great a space that they would weary the reader, unless he had a ravenous appetite for the literature of early Highland history; if so, he may feast on the ample particulars of those events in which the Fairy-man played his part, as they are set forth in Gregory's 'Highlands and Isles,' Stewart's 'Sketches of the Highlanders,' Skene's Highlanders of Scotland,' Dr. Browne's History of the Highlands,' Dr. A. MacDonald's Historical Sketches of the Island of Islay,' Cosmo Innes' Sketches of Early Scotch History,' and the like sources. Concisely narrated, and divested of all superfluous matter, the following is the account of Dusith, the Fairy-man, and the MacDonald's last struggle, together with the romantic story of the Lady of the Rock, and the traditionary legends with which the history has been embellished.

6

6

Duart, with its ancient castle standing on the brink of a precipice, on the Sound of Mull, is the most eastern point of Torosay, in the Isle of Mull, and became the property of the Macleans somewhere about the middle of the fourteenth century, when two young Irishmen, who had come to Aros, in Mull, on a visit to the lord of the isles, found the place and the people so much to their liking, that they married the chief's two daughters, and settled down in the isle of their adoption. They were of equal rank to the ladies of their choice; for they were the sons of the famous Irish chieftain, Gillean-na-Tuadh, the lineal descendant of Aonghus, who was King of Ireland when Cicero was Consul in another portion of Europe. Mr. John Beaton, the last of the Highland Senachies,' has painfully traced the pedigree of these two young Macleans up to the royal Aonghus, through forty-seven persons, all of them with names more or less unpronounceable. The two Macleans settled at Duart and Lochbuy--which was a few miles distant, on the southern side of the island; and their descendants, being near of kin, made raids upon each other, according to the then prevailing family custom. Then