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Reminiscences of a Highland Parish
By Norman MacLeod D.D. (1871)


Preface to Second Edition

I AM for many reasons peculiarly gratified by the reception which has been given to these sketches of Highland life and manners in several of their least-known aspects, and these reminiscences of a state of society which has almost passed away with the old people of the land.

Several mistakes in the earlier chapters, of a local and personal kind,—in no way, however, affecting the truthfulness of the narrative, or the impression intended to be conveyed by it,—have been pointed out to me. I have, in this edition, corrected as many of them as possible.

If I have recorded little in these pages regarding the inmates of the manse during the later years of its history, it is only because delicacy to the living forbade my doing what otherwise would have been prompted by affection, and by happy memories, which connect the past with the present. Indeed, so mingled in my thoughts are my earlier and later days in "the Parish," that some incidents recorded here as having belonged to the one, I find belong in reality to the other.

It is alleged—with what truth it is not for me to determine—that a Scotchman cannot understand a joke; but, judging from the grave manner in which allusions made by me to the bagpipes, peat-reek, &c., have been commented on by some of the southern newspapers, I am disposed to think that this dullness of apprehension is not always confined to one side of the Tweed.

I have only further to add, that the translations from the Gaelic were made by my brother-in-law, the Rev. Mr. Clerk, minister of Kilmallie, one of the best Gaelic scholars living.

July, 1867.

Contents

Good Words 1863 edition
Contains the first edition of this book which was serialised in it. (pdf)


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