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

FOLK-TALES OF HIGHLAxND HOSPITALITY
But Donald and Big Iain never paid her a second visit.
Nor were they able to say whether she was human or elfin.
The Man from Inverlochy.
Tales of a similar nature are told of the hospitality
granted to soldiers engaged in the wars that unsettled the
Highlands for so many centuries.
After the Battle of Inverlochy, a soldier fled into the
wilds of Lochaber. Wounded and far spent, he came at
night to the door of a cottage, to which he had been attracted
by a faint light glimmering in a window. With trembling
hand, he knocked at the door, which was opened to him by
an old woman of sad countenance. " Come in, and take
" she said to the fugitive in gentle, Gaelic tones.
your breath !
Years afterwards that Man from Inverlochy committed
his adventures and experiences to writing; and of the old
woman of Lochaber he wrote : " May God grant that she
shall have her share of Paradise, for that night she spoke
the sweetest words to me that ever came from a woman's
"
lips !
MacNab's Welcome to the Sheriff-Officer.
As did so many Highland lairds, one of the chiefs of the
Clan MacNab fell into the bad habit of contracting debts
which he seemed never likely to be in a position to licjuidate.
In due course there arrived from Edinburgh a sheriff-officer
charged with the duty of serving a summons upon him in
respect of his financial liabilities. Not to be put out by the
arrival of such an emissary, the MacNab invited the sheriffofficer
to make himself quite at home ; and, upon the plea
that the latter could not very well return to Edinburgh that
day, the MacNab persuaded him to tarry the night. Meanwhile
he regaled him copiously with whisky. After dark,
when the unsolicited guest had fallen into a drunken drowse
by the fire, the MacNab directed a number of his retainers
to construct a life-sized effigy of the sheriff-officer, and to
suspend the same by the neck from the bough of a tree
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