Note 27 — Chapter VI · COMMERCIAL TRAVELLERS AND THEIR ANECDOTES.

As to language, one hears, especially in the Hebrides, phrases of amusing quaintness, due no doubt to the speaker handling a foreign tongue. The school in one of the Mull villages is very small, and I made a remark to that effect in the hearing of the hotel-porter. "Oh, no," said he, "it is a good deal bigger than you would wonder." The same waiter, who had a talent for confusing his language, said in reply to an irate visitor who had questioned his intelligence: "You need not talk like that; I am as good as you; I am as good as any other man put together."