The
supernatural is too pleasant a thing for us to discard in an earnest,
scientific manner like Mr. Kipling's Aurelian McGubben. Perhaps I am
more superstitious than the boatman, and the yarns I swopped with him
about ghosts I have met would seem even more mendacious to possessors of
pocket microscopes and of the modern spirit. But I would rather have one
banshee story than fifteen pages of proof that "life, which began as a
cell, with a c, is to end as a sell, with an s." It should be added that
the boatman has given his consent to the printing of his yarns. On being
offered a moiety of the profits, he observed that he had no objection to
these, but that he entirely declined to be responsible for any share of
the expenses. Would that all authors were as sagacious, for then the
amateur novelist and the minor poet would vex us no more.
Perhaps I should note that I have not made the boatman say "whateffer,"
because he doesn't. The occasional use of the imperfect is almost his
only Gaelic idiom. It is a great comfort and pleasure, when the trout do
not rise, to meet a skilled and unaffected narrator of the old beliefs,
old legends, as ancient as the hills that girdle and guard the loch, or
as antique, at least, as man's dwelling among the mountains--the Yellow
Hill, the Calf Hill, the Hill of the Stack.
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