The peat-fire flame : folk-tales and traditions of the Highlands & Islands

BIRD LORE
day when his father, impatient with the noise that starlings
were making in the eaves, asked his son to interpret their
conversation. " They are saying that one day you will be
waiting on me at your own table," the son replied.
So incensed by this remark was the chief that his son felt
obliged to quit his home. In course of time he arrived in
France, where he learnt that the king of that country was
pestered with the chirpings of an inordinate bevy of
sparrows about his palace. His offer to the king was
accepted, that he should visit the birds at the palace, and
hear what explanation they had to give for their continual
commotion. Wherefore he duly interviewed the sparrows,
and soon learnt that their perpetual wrangling was due to
a long-standing dispute among them. This dispute he
settled amicably, to the satisfaction both of the birds them-
selves and of the king.
Now, this king of France felt so grateful to the wanderer
from Scotland for his having restored the peace of his
palace that he bestowed upon him a galley, fully equipped
and fully manned. During the wanderer's voyages in this
galley, he visited many strange lands. It so happened that
on one occasion he found himself in the territory of another
king, whose palace was as infested with rats as that of the
king of France had been disturbed by the noise of querulous
sparrows. Against this plague of rats the king's household
was utterly helpless. News of his plight soon reached the
ears of the young adventurer from Kintail; and so he
proffered his services to the king of this strange land, just
as he had done in the case of the king of France. Aboard
his galley he carried a cat that drove the rats out of the
palace so thoroughly that the king gave him a hogshead of
gold in exchange for the cat.
After an absence from Scotland extending over some ten
years, the wanderer sailed for home with his hogshead of
gold. And they say in Kintail that he anchored his galley
in the channel between Totaig and the rocky islet on which
now stands the restored Castle of Eilean Donan. So
sightly was the galley, and so richly laden, that her arrival
occasioned something of a sensation among the humble
clachans of Kintail—so much so, in sooth, that, when its
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