The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

The Highland Monthly.
himself, the host and the newsmonger of the township, with
closely cropped hair, long bushy beard, and sharp, grey,
intelligent eyes, mending, with the help of a dim and
flickering light from a tin lamp containing home-
manufactured cod-liver oil, a herring net suspended from a
rope attached to two rafters, one on each side of the roof.
Aonghas Ban is one of that class of people who combine
the occupations both of a crofter and a fisherman, a class
of people very numerous in the sea-board districts of the
Highlands. He has a croft on which he grows a supply of
potatoes, and sufficient fodder to maintain two or three
cows and a few sheep. He has also a share of a first-class
fishing boat, the " Pride of the Ocean," with which he goes
to the herring fishing at Wick for two months every year.
During the spring and autumn he is at home working his
croft, and engaged in lobster fishing during the winter
months. Next to Aonghas Ban sits his better-half busily
engaged with the spinning-wheel, and at her feet is seated
Alastair, her first born, or a small wooden box, the original
use of which the letters BLACKING, printed on one
side in large type, sufficiently explain. Aonghas Ban is
married, now six years, and nothing pleases him so much
as to entertain his visitors with reminiscences of the days
when he courted his "blue-eyed Jenny," and the heightened
colour in Jenny's face, and the merry twinkle in her clear,
blue eyes, when Aonghas tells once more the oft-repeated
tale " ,
how he serv^ed that smith chap from Clachandu whom
he caught one dark winter night prowling suspicioi^sly
near the big carpenter's house where Jennyvvas at service,
by chasing him into the midden-heap at the end of the
cowshed, where he stuck fast, and how he then assailed
him wit;]^ a, ter,i?ific .volley of snowballs, until the smith
promised never again, to speak to bli.ie-eyed Jenny ;" I say
that to see the heightened colour in Jenny's face, and, tJie
merry twinkle in her- clear, blue eyes, shewed how she
enjoyed these stories of the. past that reminded her of the
early days of their courtship, and of the stolen hours when