Book Description

Excerpt from Historical and Traditional Sketches of Highland Families and of the Highlands "The Historical and Traditional Sketches" which will be found in the following pages, portions of which had occasionally appeared in the local papers and have been copied into other papers in various parts of Scotland, England, Ireland, India, Australia, and America, are now presented to the public in a more collected and extended form. This is complying with the desires which have been repeatedly expressed by many of the sons of the Gael at home and abroad. These Sketches have no pretension to literary excellence, nor are they put forward as a full chronological or consecutive history of the families and events to which they refer. Their interest is purely local; and their merit, if they possess any, is, that they contain historical facts, traits of character, and traditional tales of stirring times and of important personages which have not been presented by any other author. Of the author, or perhaps I should more properly say, the reciter of these tales, it would not become me, his son, to speak in terms of praise. I may, however, say, without exposing myself to censure, that from his infancy he gave a greedy ear to the recital of old stories; and when, as at was, and still is, the custom of the country, the fathers, grandfathers, and patriarchs of the town assembled together in the winter evenings and told "the tales of other times," he would sit in the "chimney nook" in wrapt attention listening to their conversation. This predilection of his youth "grew with his growth, and strengthened with his years." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.