But for the climax of this storm, worthy of Meg Dods or of Meg Merrilies, the reader may be referred to my authority, with the hint that it will be wasted on who cannot interpret the vernacular eloquence then familiar at lordly dinner-tables as in kailyard “cracks.”
Many are the stories told, in print or tradition, of the Macnab’s sayings and doings. Mr. Drummond states that the library at Taymouth Castle contained two scrapbooks filled with them, cut out of publications like the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ and the _Literary Gazette_. The most often told of these stories relates to a time when the spendthrift laird was at last falling into the toils of law, whose minions he looked on as very sons of the devil. The Perth men of business, it is said, showed indulgence to his shortcomings; but a bill of his having come into the hands of some less considerate creditor at Stirling, a clerk, accompanied by two messengers-at-arms, ventured to his house in Breadalbane on the perilous errand of taking the Macnab into custody. Getting wind of their design, he kept out of the way, and left his housekeeper schooled to play a cunning part. She welcomed the visitors, let them understand that the laird was expected home next morning, and after hospitable entertainment, sent them to bed, the clerk at one end of the house and the legal myrmidons at the other. When they awoke next morning, they were horrified to see dangling from a tree outside what seemed the body of their companion. They quickly took to flight on hearing from the housekeeper, as matter of course, that “a bit clerk body had been hanged, who came here to deave the laird for siller.” The clerk, whose greatcoat and boots had been borrowed to rig out a stuffed figure, was not less terrified by the explanation of their absence: “The laird’s gillies have taken them awa’ to be drooned in the pool of Crianlarich, and they’ll be back for _you_ the noo.” That set the clerk to flight in turn; and never again, goes the story, would anyone venture to serve a legal process on the Macnab in his own country.
Naturally such a personage did not thrive in his quarrel with the age; and when he died in 1816, what was left of the Macnab property passed into the hands of his kinsman and creditor, Lord Breadalbane, to whom the laird had stooped his pride to become a sort of humoured hanger-on. His nephew, heir to a load of debt, was fain to emigrate to Canada with a following of the broken clan. But all over Britain a sprinkling of Macnabs are found more or less flourishing, who have formed an association, two or three hundred strong, that takes on itself the pious duty of tending those ancestral graves at Killin, the chieftains buried in a central square, their humbler clansmen and connections lying round about them under the shade of funereal pine-trees. Killin has also to show a lonely stone, taken to mark the tomb of Fingal, which is said to have given the original name, _Kilfin_.