All unconscious of the disagreeable impressions regarding me, I was ushered (poor little devil!) into this world on a Friday, the most ominous day of the week for such an arrival; when a furious storm of wind was rolling the waves of the North Sea against the Sutors of Cromartie; and a tempest of rain was lashing the walls and windows of the old tower, and drenching the older pine-woods that surrounded it. A knife and spade had been placed below my mother's bed, a Bible below her pillow, and the room was plentifully sprinkled with salt, to avert the mal-influence of the fairies, and every way the old fashions of the Highlands were complied with strictly.
My father had been particularly anxious for a daughter, that he might marry her to his nephew, M'Farquhar of that Ilk, to whom he was tutor or guardian; and various wise women, who had been solemnly convened in council before I was born, had all been morally certain that my mother would have a daughter.
"You have long loved French apples," said old Mhona Toshach; "your ladyship is sure to have a daughter."
My sudden appearance upset all their calculations, and none more than those of my father.
"The devil's in the brat!" said he. "There goes the estate of M'Farquhar, with its five hundred broadswords;" for, in our Scottish fashion, he was what we call the tutor of the property.
As if to increase the general prejudice against me, I squalled right lustily, which made all the old crones of the household, and the wise women of the parish, with Mhona Toshach, my mother's nurse, at their head, tremble and predict that, through life, "sore trials and evil would attend the course of the _Friday's bairn_." All the crickets in the bakehouse disappeared that day for ever, a surer foreboding of dire calamity.
Though we were a branch of a Lowland or Perthshire family, the gallant Rollos of Duncruib, my father, partly to humour my mother, who was a daughter of the race of M'Farquhar, and partly to please his Highland neighbours, resolved to celebrate my arrival in the old country fashion. The old family banner, with its azure chevrons, on which the spiders had been spinning their webs since it had been last unfurled on the birth of my brother Ewen, (for my father was eminently a peaceful man,) was displayed on the old tower; and more than one gallant puncheon of ale, and bombarde of Flemish wine were set abroach in the yard. I was baptized over a broadsword. Then came the solemn and important ceremony of placing in my mouth "the Rollo spoon," which was done in presence of the whole household; and which, from the consternation it occasioned, requires some explanation.