Unconsciously and dimly he became aware of a
mysterious and mighty power somehow and somewhere in the Glen straining
at the heart-strings of its children. Of the nature and origin of this
mysterious and mighty power, the young Canadian knew little. His
country was of too recent an origin for mystery, and its people too
heterogeneous in their ethnic characteristics to furnish a soil for
tribal instincts and passions. The passionate loves and hatreds of the
clans, their pride of race, their deathless lealty; and more than all,
and better than all, their religious instincts, faiths and prejudices;
these, with the mystic, wild loveliness of heather-clad hill and
rock-rimmed loch, of roaring torrent and jagged crags, of lonely muir
and sunny pasture nuiks; all these, and ten thousand nameless and
unnamable things united in the weaving of the spell of the Glen upon the
hearts of its people. Of how it all came to be, Martin knew nothing,
but like an atmosphere it stole in upon him, and he came to vaguely
understand something of what it meant to be a Highlander, and to bid
farewell to the land into whose grim soil his life roots had struck
deep, and to tear himself from hearts whose life stream and his had
flowed as one for a score of generations. So from cot to cot Martin
followed and observed, until they came to the crossing where the broad
path led up from the highroad to the kirkyard and the kirk.
Pages:
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143