clxviii.] Livingstone has told us most that is known of his forefathers; how his great-grandfather fell at Culloden, fighting for the old line of kings; how his grandfather could go back for six generations of his family before him, giving the particulars of each; and how the only tradition he himself felt proud of was that of the old man who had never heard of any person in the family being guilty of dishonesty, and who charged his children never to introduce the vice.

He used also to tell his children, when spurring them to diligence at school, that neither had he ever heard of a Livingstone who was a donkey.

He has also recorded a tradition that the people of the island were converted from being Roman Catholics "by the laird coming round with a man having a yellow staff, which would seem to have attracted more attention than his teaching, for the new religion went long afterward--perhaps it does so still--by the name of the religion of the yellow stick." The same story is told of perhaps a dozen other places in the Highlands; the "yellow stick" seems to have done duty on a considerable scale.
There were traditions of Ulva life that must have been very congenial to the temperament of David Livingstone.

In the "Statistical Account" of the parish to which it belongs[2] we read of an old custom among the inhabitants, to remove with their flocks in the beginning of each summer to the upland pastures, and bivouac there till they were obliged to descend in the month of August.

The open-air life, the free intercourse of families, the roaming frolics of the young men, the songs and merriment of young and old, seem to have made this a singularly happy time.