Head-shakings and misgivings notwithstanding, individuality of country life may very well be left to take care of itself. Children remain true to their instincts under the new régime as under the old; and growing like the trees of the hedgerows, amid the influences of wild and varied nature, rustic character may still be trusted to develop a picturesqueness of its own. The real country school, after all, does not lie within four walls, nor is it ruled by the rod of prim school-ma’am or spectacled dominie. Nature herself, the primeval _alma mater_ of all mankind, is the educator there. The leaves of her primers are stored in the woodlands; her history-books are written and explained by the seasons themselves; the lark and the rivulet are the perpetual tutors of her “old notation”; and her terms are timed by the bloom and flight of the snowdrop and the swallow.
Hardly more than twenty miles from the populous heart of Glasgow lies a parish of which no notice is to be found in the guide-books. No show-place is supposed to be there, and no tourist route runs through it, and so, though almost within hearing of the hum of a great city, the strip of country between mountain and loch remains all but as primitive in its rustic simplicity as it was a hundred years ago. A century ago, indeed, the district may have been better known than it is to-day, if notoriety be regarded as a distinction; for every corrie in the hillsides and every burnside hollow, where a little wooding afforded concealment, appears then to have been the scene of illicit distilling operations; and the raids of the excise and military in search of “sma’ stills” were both frequent and famous. With this exception the parish has been allowed to slumber on in happy obscurity since the days of the old clan feuds and the cattle-liftings of its neighbours, the wild Macgregors.
Nevertheless, unknown though it may be, and unfrequented by “the Sassenach” as in the days of Rob Roy himself, this quiet loch-shore has a history stirring enough, and memories of its own. Situated just on the old Highland line, the district must frequently at all periods have been the scene of warlike episodes. Regarding the tastes and pursuits of its ancient inhabitants there remains small doubt. The memorial of a peaceful enough enterprise, it is true, seems crystallised in the name of the parish--the parish of St Ronan’s Cell, as it reads translated. Midway, it is said, on his journey from Kilmarnock in Ayrshire to Kilmaronaig on Loch Etive, that famous missionary priest of the early Church thought it worth his while to tarry a space in the district in order to teach the rude inhabitants peace. But, to judge by the later events of history, the task would seem to have had but doubtful results. The prevailing names, at the present hour, of the people in the district--Galbraith, Macfarlane, M’Kean--recall the circumstances of less orderly times. In the stalwart farmers’ sons guiding the plough and feeding the cattle about the steadings there to-day, one sees the lineal descendants of clansmen who once held their own on the loch-side by the primitive _coir a glaive_--the title of the strong arm. To keep these turbulent vassals in order, the Earls of Lennox found it necessary to hold three castles in the neighbourhood.