Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

108 HOSl'ITAMTY.
yet failed me. As to the rest, whoever chooses to try,
must draw his own conclusions. Were I to make that
which is proverbially odious, I should say that this vir-
tue actually flourishes in Orkney and Shetland as it is
said to do in the Highlands. The fashions of your friend
Magnus Troil have been mollified, of course; but the
feeling is the same. Such, 1 doubt not, the Highlands
once were : it is not the only point on which they have
lost what the former have preserved.
But this subject deserves another word or two
though I am not going, like a German Professor, to give
you a treatise on hospitality, commencing with Adam or
Abraham. If there was an ancient Highland hospitality,
as we are assured, it must have been founded on the same
feelings as among the Germans and Gauls, or a part of
that habit which prevailed among these people; with
whom it was equal to sacrilege, as Tacitus says, to shut
the door on a stranger. This is the hospitality of the
Jews, of the Arabs, and of the Orientals in general;
among whom it was a practice, and in times not barba-
rous, even to wash the stranger's feet. 1 need not quote a
Divine remonstrance in proof of this custom. Nor was
it limited to rank. In Athenseus, the daughters of
Cocalus King of Sicily conduct Dcedalus to the bath.
If the Highlanders boast that they did not ask the
stranger's name, equally polite, as I formerly remarked,
are the American tribes and the Arabs : and Homer, in
speaking of Nausicaa, and elsewhere, also notices that
the name was not asked till after the repast ; because the
security of the guest had then been established by the
libation ; by the bread and salt and wine. Yet it does
not very clearly appear how the ancient Highlanders
could have exercised much of this general hospitality,
when almost every clan was at feud with another: and
;