as an inn with an innkeeper, who was a Maclean, it
appeared, of a very high family; for to keep an inn is thought even more
genteel in the Highlands than it is with us, perhaps as partaking of
hospitality, or perhaps because the trade is idle and drunken. He spoke
good English, and, finding me to be something of a scholar, tried me
first in French, where he easily beat me, and then in the Latin, in
which I don't know which of us did best. This pleasant rivalry put us at
once upon friendly terms; and I sat up and drank punch with him (or, to
be more correct, sat up and watched him drink it), until he was so tipsy
that he wept upon my shoulder.

I tried him, as if by accident, with a sight of Alan's button; but it
was plain he had never seen or heard of it. Indeed, he bore some grudge
against the family and friends of Ardshiel, and before he was drunk he
read me a lampoon, in very good Latin, but with a very ill meaning,
which he had made in elegiac verses upon a person of that house.

When I told him of my catechist, he shook his head, and said I was lucky
to have got clear off. "That is a very dangerous man," he said; "Duncan
Mackiegh is his name; he can shoot by the ear at several yards, and has
been often accused of highway robberies, and once of murder."

"The cream of it is," says I, "that he called himself a catechist."

"And why should he not?" says he, "when that is what he is. It was
Maclean of Duart gave it to him because he was blind. But perhaps it was
a peety," says my host, "for he is always on the road, going from one
place to another to hear the young folk say their religion, and
doubtless that is a great temptation to the poor man."

At last, when my landlord could drink no more, he showed me to a bed,
and I lay down in very good spirits; having travelled the greater part
of that big and crooked Island of Mull, from Earraid to Torosay, fifty
miles as the crow flies, and (with my wanderings) much nearer a hundred,
in four days and with little fatigue. Indeed, I was by far in better
heart and health of body at the end of that long tramp than I had been
at the beginning.

CHAPTER XVI

THE LAD WITH THE SILVER BUTTON ACROSS MORVEN

There is a regular ferry from Torosay to Kinlochaline on the mainland.
Both shores of the sound are in the country of the strong clan of the
Macleans, and the people that passed the ferry with me were almost all
of that clan. The skipper of the boat, on the other ha