e account (Mr. Clark, of Ulva) says that he had
frequently listened with delight to the tales of pastoral life led by
the people on these occasions; it was indeed a relic of Arcadia. There
were tragic traditions, too, of Ulva; notably that of Kirsty's Rock, an
awful place where the islanders are said to have administered Lynch law
to a woman who had unwittingly killed a girl she meant only to frighten,
for the alleged crime--denied by the girl--of stealing a cheese. The
poor woman was broken-hearted when she saw what she had done; but the
neighbors, filled with horror, and deaf to her remonstrances, placed her
in a sack, which they laid upon a rock covered by the sea at high water,
where the rising tide slowly terminated her existence. Livingstone
quotes Macaulay's remark on the extreme savagery of the Highlanders of
those days, like the Cape Caffres, as he says; and the tradition of
Kirsty's Rock would seem to confirm it. But the stories of the
"baughting-time" presented a fairer aspect of Ulva life, and no doubt
left happier impressions on his mind. His grandfather, as he tells us,
had an almost unlimited stock of such stories, which he was wont to
rehearse to his grandchildren and other rapt listeners.
[Footnote 2: Kilninian and Kilmore. See _New Statistical Account of
Scotland_, Argyllshire, p. 345]
When, for the first and last time in his life, David Livingstone visited
Ulva, in 1864, in a friend's yacht, he could hear little or nothing of
his relatives. In 1792, his grandfather, as he tells us, left it for
Blantyre, in Lanarkshire, about seven miles from Glasgow, on the banks
of the Clyde, where he found employment in a cotton factory. The dying
charge of the unnamed ancestor must have sunk into the heart of his
descendant, for, being a God-fearing man and of sterling honesty, he was
employed in the conveyance of large sums of money from Glasgow to the
works, and in his old age was pensioned off, so as to spend his
declining years in ease and comfort. There is a tradition in the family,
showing his sense of the value of education, that he was complimented by
the Blantyre school-master for never grudging the price of a school-book
for any of his children--a compliment, we fear, not often won at the
present day. The other near relations of Livingstone seem to have left
the island at the same time, and settled in Canada, Prince Edward's
Isle, and the United States.
The influence of his Highland blood was apparen
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