integrity upon society in every part of the world in which his lot has been cast, and where duty has called him.”

Selkirk stated that if a small labour was to be performed, there was none more competent than the Highlander:

Though the Highlanders are certainly very inferior to their Southern neighbours in the habits of regular and steady industry, yet, for a temporary effort, there are few people equal to them; none who will submit to greater hardships and privations, where there was a great object to be ac- complished.’l

The Highlanders were frugal by necessity in this frontier colony. Their homes were furnished only with the basic requirements of housekeeping; their clothes were made of homespun (for the men) and drugget (for the women); their acquisition of books was usually restricted to a family copy of the Gaelic Bible.

In this regard, the Lowlanders’ most pragmatic nature and ex- perience with larger-scale farming and richer farmland afforded the Highlanders some assistance. A Lowlander living near Belfast named Alexander Anderson brought with him to Prince Edward Island the colony’s first cart wheels, a gig and the famous black oats, amicably sharing all with his neighbours. His daughters were of the same altruistic disposition. It is said they brought from Scotland the first heckle used in Orwell Cove and “taught their neighbouring Highland women not only how to use it, but also how to plant and harvest the flax on which to use it.”’2

It was this sense of cooperation that laid the framework for the birth of a formal Scottish society. It was this nature that drew men together to form associations dedicated to the ardent retention of the same bonds of brotherhood and loyalty to the motherland that had sustained them and their ancestors through the trials of life in Scotland. In their new home, ancient divisions between the two groups became only minor differences, easily reconcilable. To themselves and to each other, they were now Scotsmen.” Robert Louis Stevenson expressed it well:

The fact remains: in spite of the differences of blood and language the Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander. When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other’s neck in spirit; even at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy in their talk.“

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