We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
ROAMIN' IN THE GLOAMIN' 25
good the gaunt and grim Bass Rock can ever have been to the ancient Lauders. Later I discovered that it was reputed in the old days to have been the haunt and hiding place of a nest of villainous Scottish pirates. This thought pleased me much ; every time I looked at the weather-beaten rock I pictured my ancestors as bold buccaneers setting forth from their caves on the rock to harry and rob the English and any other nation — but particularly the English. This pleasant task is still popularly supposed to be one of the principal occupations of Scotland !
My mother was a MacLennan. She came of real Highland stock. Her full name was Isabella Urquhart MacLeod MacLennan. Her people came from the Black Isle in Rossshire. She was a splendid woman in every respect and I hold her memory in reverence. Like all Highland women she had a great strain of romance and mysticism in her make-up. She was full of superstition and believed implicitly in "signs and portents." She had a never-ending fund of stories about witches and war-locks and fairies and water-kelpies ; when her family grew more numerous I can remember us sitting round her knee listening, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, with many a nervous look over our shoulders, to tales of supernatural happenings on the mountains or in the glens or on the lochs and rivers of the Black Isle. The request, "Tell us a story, Mither !" never found her wanting. She would stop her housework at any minute of the day to spin us youngsters a tale of romance or chivalry or mystery or horror. I loved her stories from my earliest years. She had all the Scottish Clan histories at her tongue's tip and nothing delighted me more than tales of the MacLennans, the. Urquharts, the Logans, or the MacLeods. Thus did I become imbued with Highland lore and romance. Today whenever I sing "Sure, by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go," my blood boils in a sort of "Hielan' ecstasy"