LAURA EVERINGHAM;

OR,

THE HIGHLANDERS OF GLEN ORA.

BY

JAMES GRANT,

AUTHOR OF "THE ROMANCE OF WAR," "THE AIDE-DE-CAMP,"
ETC. ETC.

"Ruin's wheel has driven o'er us,
Not a hope dare now attend;
The world wide is all before us,
But a world without a friend!"
Strathallan's Lament.

LONDON:
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS,
THE BROADWAY, LUDGATE.
NEW YORK: 416, BROOME STREET.

LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

CONTENTS.

CHAP.

I. [The Foster Brothers]
II. [The Feudal Lords of the Nineteenth Century]
III. [Mr. Ephraim Snaggs]
IV. [The Rock of the Boar]
V. [Callum Dhu]
VI. [Which Treats of many Things]
VII. [The Rent Court]
VIII. [Minnie]
IX. [The Red Priest of Applecross]
X. [The Stone of the Sun]
XI. [My Mother]
XII. [The Gathering]
XIII. [The Stone of Strength]
XIV. [The Seven Bullets]
XV. [The Sixth Day]
XVI. [Sir Horace]
XVII. [Mr. Snobleigh]
XVIII. [Death!]
XIX. [The Eviction]
XX. [Desolation]
XXI. [The Heather on Fire!]
XXII. [The Uisc Dhu]
XXIII. [The Ruined Cottage]
XXIV. [The White Stag]
XXV. [The Gael and the Saxon]
XXVI. [A Last Interview]
XXVII. [Dumbarton]
XXVIII. [My Regiment]
XXIX. [The Route—We Sail]
XXX. [The Troop Ship]
XXXI. [The Reefs of Palegrossa]
XXXII. [The Yuze Bashi]
XXXIII. [The Khan]
XXXIV. [Story of the Greek Lieutenant]
XXXV. [The Execution]
XXXVI. [In Orders for Duty]
XXXVII. [I March To Rodosdchigg]
XXXVIII. [The Vision of Corporal Moustapha]
XXXIX. [The Turkish Veil]
XL. [A Love Adventure]
XLI. [A Strange Task]
XLII. [Two Charming Eyes]
XLIII. [I Scale the Window]
XLIV. [Temptation and Folly]
XLV. [Story of the Wise King and the Wicked Geni]
XLVI. [Hussein's Wrath]
XLVII. [Sequel to Chapter Forty-Three]
XLVIII. [The Turkish Boat]
XLIX. [The Bagnio]
L. [The Two Turkish Lieutenants]
LI. [Dreams and Longings]
LII. [The Galiondoi]
LIII. [A Row in the Bagnio]
LIV. [Flight]
LV. [Resume my Command]
LVI. [Biodh Treun!]
LVII. [The Isle of Marmora]
LVIII. [The Fairy Bell]
LIX. [A Gleam of other Days]
LX. [Farewell]

THE HIGHLANDERS OF GLEN ORA.

CHAPTER I.
THE FOSTER-BROTHERS.

It was after sunset in the month of April three years ago.

The hills of the Western Highlands were still tipped with a golden gleam, but the deep and savage hollows of Glen Ora were gloomy and full of dark shadows. Still crowned with the snow of last winter, above it towered Ben Ora, beneath whose mighty scalp the giant peaks of the north and west were dwindled down to little hills; for among those stupendous mountains the eye becomes so accustomed to their colossal proportions, that all just ideas of size and distance are lost. At its base spread one of those vast tracts of brown or purple heath so common in the Scottish Highlands, overspread by a wilderness of stones, and torn by ghastly ravines from which the mist of downward torrents rose. The sides of these were tufted by those black whin bushes, the introduction of which tradition ascribes to the hunting Stuarts, as a cover for their game.

On the western shoulder of Ben Ora, a ridge of riven and naked rocks, resembling the skeleton of a mountain range, stood a herd of deer, with all their proud antlers visible against the clear bright flush of the sunset sky.

Two men were observing them from the rugged bank of one of the watercourses, in which they were half hidden. One carried a fishing-rod, and the other a gun.

He with the rod was a tall, stout, and well-made lad of some twenty years, with dark-blue eyes, curly brown hair, and a sunburnt visage; he wore a grey shooting-jacket and kilt, a sporran, of badger-skin, and a heather-coloured bonnet. His companion was a few years older, larger in form, brawny, thickset, and strong as a Highland bull, and his knees, where shown by his tattered kilt and well-worn hose, of no colour known in nature, were almost as hairy as those of the same animal. He wore the usual coarse blue jacket and bonnet of a Highland peasant.

His hair, beard, and whiskers, which grew all matted in a curly mass, were black, almost to that deep tint which seems blue when touched by the light; his eyes were dark, restless, keen, and sparkling; his nose somewhat short and saucy, but his face, which was browned to the hue of mahogany by exposure to the weather, was thoughtful, stern, anxious, and at times even haggard in expression. Save his gun and skene-dhu, he had no weapon, though his aspect and bearing were rough and wild as those of any Celtic bandit we have read of in romance; but then his figure was a model of manly beauty, symmetry, and grace.

The first personage with the red was Allan Mac Innon, MYSELF, and the dark and handsome man was my foster-brother—-my co-dhalta—Black Mac Ian—usually named by us Callum Dhu, and on this eventful evening we were observing a party of five English tourists or visitors, who were somewhat rashly (as they were without a guide) urging their shaggy shelties up the side of Ben Ora, to obtain a view of the scenery by moonlight.

This party consisted of two fair and laughing English girls, wearing broad brown straw hats; and three gentlemen clad in those peculiar coats and tartan caps, without which no Sassenach deems himself eligible to pass the Highland frontier.

'Callum,' said I, 'shall I net warn them to beware?'

'It would ill become your father's son to run after their tails, like a keeper or gilly,' said he, grasping my arm angrily, as we spoke in Gaelic, to give the original of which would fidget my friend the printer.

'Callum, they are not more than half-a-mile off now.'

'Oh, what a pity it is, that the half-mile was not a thousand, ay, or ten thousand! The fires that may be extinguished this summer on many a hearth in Glen Ora would burn all the brighter perhaps in winter.'

'Not in the least, Callum; for if we had not one truculent tyrant over us,' said I, 'we would be certain to have another.'

'Aich ay; for the Mac Innons of Glen Ora are doomed men! and—'

'See, see,' I exclaimed, 'they have almost reached the Craig-na-tuirc, and if they attempt to descend after nightfall, something terrible will happen.'

'Let it happen: if it is their fate, can we avert it?' said Callum, with a dark scowl in his eyes which sparkled in the last flush of the west; 'what matter is it to you, Allan Mac Innon? Has not this man—this Horace Everingham, Baronet, and so forth, who bought the fair patrimony your father's brother wasted in all manner of riotous living—told you coldly, when begging a six months' mercy for your sick mother, and for the two-and-thirty poor families in the glen, that he intrusted all such petty affairs to his factor, (that mangy Lowland cur, Ephraim Snaggs, with his Bible phrases and pious quotations,) and what said he? That the new proprietor had resolved to turn the glen into a deer forest—-a hunting field—and that whether the rents were forthcoming or not, the people must go! That Canada was a fine place for such as they, and that hampers of foreign game would soon replace them. The curse of heaven be on his foreign game, say I! When the Queen wants men to recruit the ranks of the Black Watch, of the Gordon Highlanders, and the Ross-shire Buffs, will she borrow the contents of the Lowlander's hamper? Let these moonlight visitors go over the rocks if they will—let Loch Ora receive their bodies and the devil their souls, for what matters it to you, Mac Innon, or to me?'

'True, true,' said I, bitterly, 'but there are two ladies with them—Laura, the daughter of Sir Horace, and her friend.'

'They, at least, are kind to the poor people, and gave many a pound to the women of Glentuirc, when they were expatriated last year; yet evil comes over every stranger who crosses Ben Ora.'

'A spirit is said to haunt it,' said I.

'Would to heaven a spirit haunted the glen, and kept out all but those whose right comes not from paper or from parchment—but from the hand of God!'

'But the women, Callum?'

'Co-dhalta, be not a soft-hearted fool,' was the pettish response; 'who cared for our women, when the sheriff, Mac Fee, with his police and soldiers, came here and tore down the huts, and fired through the thatch to force the people out? Who cared for old bedridden Aileen Mac Donuil, whose four sons died with eight hundred of our Cameronians in India, and who was shot through the body, and died miserably on the wet hill side three days after? And so, forth were they all driven to the shore by the baton and bayonet—the old and the young, the strong man and the infant, the aged, the frail, and the women almost in labour—to be crammed on board the great ship, the Duchess, and taken to America, like slaves from Africa, and why? Because the land that gave corn and potatoes to the people was wanted to fatten the grouse and red deer, and thus were they driven forth from their fathers' holdings, their fathers' homes and graves; so Allan, believe me, your sympathy for the strangers who are now on the hill, is all moonshine in the water. Ha! ha! something always happens to those who go up Ben Ora after nightfall. You remember the story of Alaster Grant, the Captain Dhu, or Black Alexander from Urquhart? He was a frightfully immoral character, savage and fierce, and was said to have done dreadful things in the Indian wars, fighting, plundering, and sparing neither man, woman, nor child. Well, this dissolute soldier was shooting with some of his wild companions from Fort William, about a year after Waterloo. They spent a night on Ben Ora, and all that night the lightning played about its scalp. Next morning a shepherd—old Alisdair Mac Gouran—found their hut torn to pieces; the whole party, to all appearance, strangled, their gun-barrels twisted like corkscrews, and the Black Captain's body torn limb from limb, and strewed all around; but whether by a thunderbolt or the devil, no man knew, though many averred it must have been the latter. Six months ago, I watched an Englishman or a Lowlander, (which, I neither know nor care,) go up the Craig-na-tuirc, and he never more came down; but three months after, his bones, or little more, were found at the mouth of the Uisc Dhu, with his travelling knapsack and sketch-book close by; for six long miles the Lammas floods had swept them from the spot where he must have perished. Two others went up in October, and in ascending the mountain were singing merrily; but the snow came down that night, and hid the path; the cold was bitter, and the deer were driven down to the clachan in the glen. Next day we found the strangers stiff enough, and piled a cairn to mark the spot. I warned another traveller, a Scotsman too, from the Braes of Angus, against ascending the Ben alone! He, too, went up laughing, and came down no more. A week or two after I was standing on the brow of the Craig-na-tuirc, and saw a gathering of the ravens in the corrie below. I heard their exulting croak, and the flap of their dusky wings; and there, in the moss of the wet ravine, we found the traveller's body wedged up to the neck, and his bare skull divested of eyes, nose, and hair, picked white and clean by these birds of evil omen. Then we all know the story of the keeper that was gored by the white stag, on the night your father died.'

'All this I know well enough,' said I, 'and hence my anxiety for the two ladies, who are now in the dusk, ascending that dangerous precipice.'

'Who pities our women—yet they are starving?'

'God pities them.'

'He alone!' responded Callum, lifting his tattered bonnet at the name; 'yet my poor mother died in my arms of sheer hunger, and Snaggs, the factor, mocked me at her funeral, because I had a piper who played the march of Gil Chriosd before her coffin; but I heard him with scorn, for I knew that my mother—she who nursed you, Allan Mac Innon, had now that inheritance of which not even her Grace of Sutherland, or the great Lord of Breadalbane, can deprive the poor Highlander—a grave on the mountain side, and a home among the angels in heaven.'

The words of my foster-brother raised a momentary glow of indignation in my breast; and turning away from the mountain, we began to descend into the glen in the twilight, and I strove to think no more about the strangers or their fate, but in vain, for Laura Everingham, with all her pretty winning ways, was still before me, and her voice was in my ear.

We had met repeatedly in our mutual rides, rambles, and wanderings, and the impression she made upon me, when acting as her guide to the old ruined chapels, towers, and burial-places, the high cascades, and deep corries of the Ora, and other solemn scenes of nature, with which our district abounded, was lasting, pure, and deep. I was learning to love her, more dearly than I dared to tell, for poverty—crushing, grinding poverty—like a mountain weighed upon my heart and tongue; yet Laura knew my secret—at least I hoped so; pure devotion and true tenderness cannot remain long concealed; a woman soon discovers them by a mysterious intuition, and as Laura (knowing this) neither repulsed nor shunned me, was I not justified in believing myself not altogether indifferent to her?

Time will tell. 'Happy age,' says some Italian writer, 'when a look, the rustle of a garment—a flower—a mere nothing, suffice to make the youthful heart overflow with torrents of joy!'

The severity of Sir Horace, and the pride, petulance, and hostility of my mother, of whom more in good time, had partly estranged us of late; but Laura had repeatedly said,

'If I knew your mother, Allan, I am sure she would learn to love me.'

'I know not, Miss Everingham, how any one could help loving you!' was my reply, and I trembled at my own temerity.

One word more for Callum Dhu, and he and my reader must be acquainted for life.

His grandfather was that noble and heroic Mac Ian, who, after the defeat of Prince Charles, watched over him with matchless fidelity for weeks, concealing him in the mountains at the risk of his life, and robbing for his support while his own children were starving, and though he knew that 30,000l. were set upon the head of the royal fugitive. This poor man was afterwards, when in extreme old age, hanged at Inverness, for 'lifting' a sheep; but, though impelled by hunger to borrow subsistence from the folds of the wealthy, he had scrupulously avoided the possessions of the poor; and before death, took off his bonnet, to 'thank the blessed God that he had never betrayed his trust, never injured the poor, nor refused to share his crust with the stranger, the needy, or the fatherless.'

This poor sheepstealer died like a Christian and a hero, and had in youth been one of those Highland warriors whose more than Spartan faith and truth a late pitiful historian has dared to stigmatize as mere ignorance of the value of gold. Under the same circumstances, we presume, this Scottish writer would have known to a penny the value set upon the head of his fugitive guest.

With his blood and spirit, Callum Dhu had inherited many of the wild ideas and primitive Celtic virtues of his ancestor, as the reader will see when they become better acquainted.

CHAPTER II.
THE FEUDAL LORDS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Turning our steps homeward, after a day of wandering and fishing, we traversed the Braes of Glen Ora, a wild and desolate scene, such as Horatio Mac Culloch would love to paint, tufted by broom and whin; torn by savage watercourses, all yellow marl and gravel, swept by the foaming torrent, or jagged by ghastly rocks, silence on every hand, and a deep shadow over all, save where a golden gleam of light that shot between the black and distant peaks of the west, tipped the points of the purple heather with fire, and edged the scattered rocks with the last glow of the sun that had set.

Here and there, throughout this desolate tract, on which the shadows of night were descending, were blacker spots, that marked where, in the preceding year, the houses of nearly fifty crofters had been levelled or burned. No tongue was required to tell us the terrible story of legal wrong, and worse than feudal tyranny inflicted on the unresisting poor. The blackened rafters were lying on every hand among the long grass, and thrown far asunder; the humble walls were half levelled and overgrown by weeds, like the hearths around which generations had sat, and told or sung of the past memories of the Gael and the kindly chiefs of other times, in the long nights of winter, when Ben Ora was mantled by snow, and the frozen cascade hung over the rocks, white as the beard of Ossian. Here a currant-bush, or there an apple-tree, still marked amid the weeds and heather where the garden of the peasant had been. Elsewhere the glen was yet dotted by little patches of corn and potatoes, all growing wild; but where were those who had sown and planted them?

Driven from their native land to make way for sheep, or grouse, or deer, and packed in ships, like slaves for the Cuban market, the old people of the glen, the women and children, were pining on the banks of the Susquehanna; while the young and able were forced by starvation, or lured by false promises, into the ranks of the Sutherland Highlanders, and were now away to fight the Russians in the East. Thus it is that the game-laws, centralization, wilful neglect, and maladministration, reduce the people of the glens to misery, starvation, and inability to pay the exorbitant rents demanded for their little farms; then their dwellings are demolished, and themselves expelled, that one vast game preserve may be made of the land which has given to the British service nearly ninety of its finest battalions of infantry.

"Clanchattan is broken, the Seaforth bends low,
The sun of Clan Ronald is sinking in labour,
Glencoe and Clan Donoquhy, what are they now?
And where is bold Keppoch, the Lord of Lochaber?
All gone with the House they supported, laid low!
While the Dogs of the South their bold life-blood were lapping,
Trod down by a fierce and a merciless foe;
The brave are all gone, with the Stuarts of Appin!"

'My God!' exclaimed Callum, with deep emotion, as he looked around him, with a fierce and saddened eye, 'who now could think this place had given three hundred swordsmen to Glenfinnon?'

'And sent two hundred with my father to Egypt?' added I.

'Better had he and they stayed at home; for the Mac Innons might yet have brooked the land their fathers sprang from.'

Callum Dhu felt, as he spoke, like a true Celt—believing that our ancestors sprang from the soil; i.e. were the old and original race, without predecessors.

My father, the youngest of the two sons of Alaster Mac Innon, of Glen Ora, was an officer of the 42nd Highlanders, who served under Abercromby in Egypt and Wellington in Spain. His elder brother belonged, unfortunately, to the Scots Fusilier Guards, and amid the dissipation of a London life, 'in rivalling the follies of his equals in birth and superiors in fortune,' soon wasted his small but ancient patrimony, which, though it could once bring 600 swordsmen to the king's host, in more modern times did not produce more than 600l. yearly rent.

Glen Ora was not entailed, thus its broad acres of heather and whinstone-rock, mountain and torrent, slipped from under the hands of my gay uncle like a moving panorama; he died early, and the estate passed away to strangers. The old tower was demolished, and a hunting-seat built on its site, by a noble duke, whose family had enriched their pockets, if not their blood, by intermarriage with the tribe of Levi. Then began the war of extermination and expatriation in the north; and while the authoress of "Uncle Tom" was feasted and slavery reviled in the coteries of the Duchess in London, fire, sword, and eviction were enforced by Mr. Snaggs, her factor, in Glen Ora. Thus had things continued until the preceding year, when the estate was purchased by Sir Horace Everingham, of Elton Hall, Yorkshire.

My father had died on service with his regiment in Jamaica, when the yellow flag waved on Up-park Camp, and the Highland bonnets lay as thick in the yard of the pest-stricken barracks as ever they have been on the battle-field; and my mother, a Stuart, of Appin, brought me home to Glen Ora, where, with the pension of a captain's widow, she endeavoured to eke out a subsistence among our own people, and occupied as a farm, at a small rental, the thatched mansion, which in better times was the jointure-house of our family.

But a ukase had gone forth! The whole country was doomed to become a deer-forest, desolate and wild as when the first Fergus and his bare-kneed Scots landed on its shores, which perhaps no foot had trod since the waters of the Flood had left them.

The men of Glentuirc, a sept of our race, had already been swept away, and now those of Glen Ora were to follow.

As a necessary preliminary the rents had been doubled and trebled, until we were incapable of satisfying the rapacity of this alien lord, whose feudal charters gave him a more than imperial power over us. A blight had fallen on our little corn-patches; several of our sheep had been smothered in the snow, and other troubles and difficulties fell thick and fast upon us. In vain Ephraim Snaggs, the factor, was prayed for mercy; but to seek it from that astute writer to the signet and grim elder of the kirk, was 'to take a bone from a tiger.'

The olden times were gone! For ages unnumbered the Highland landlord deemed that wealth consisted in the number of families, and troops of chubby children who lived upon his lands; farms were divided and subdivided in the fertile glens, until 'every rood of land maintained its man;' and on every lot and rood was a tenant—a hardy soldier, a tiller of the soil, and the father of a sturdy and a faithful race. The laird valued his property not by the rent-roll, but by the number of brave and leal-hearted swordsmen whose homes were made thereon. This was the patriarchal system, old as the world before the Flood; for feudality, with its barbarism, its imaginary rights and slavish tenures, its monkish parchments and legal villany, was unknown in the Highlands until a comparatively recent period; and then, noble was the struggle made against it by the Wallace of the Celtic tribes, John of Moidart, who expelled and slew his nephew Ronald Galda, for accepting from James V. a feudal charter of the lands which belonged to the tribe of which he, Ronald, was the chief. In this spirit, the Highland peasant has a hereditary right to his hut—a right derived from God—but kings have given our feudal lords, even in the nineteenth century, a power over the land on which the hut is built; and at their behest whole villages are demolished, and the people swept away with a heartless barbarity sufficient to call down the lasting vengeance of heaven on the ignoble dukes and canting marquises of the northern and western Highlands!

But to resume:—

After traversing this Serbonian waste for a mile or two, we reached a little cot built under the brow of a rock; large blocks of whinstone, with a few courses of turf above them, bedded in clay, formed the walls; the roof, which was composed of divot, fern, and straw, all firmly tied by ropes of heather, was covered by moss of the richest emerald green. It was a humble dwelling, with a little window of one pane, on each side of a rude door composed of three planks nailed on bars; yet Callum Dhu, who had lived here alone since his mother's death, never closed it at meal-time, without coming forth to the road, in the hospitable old Celtic spirit, to see if a stranger or wayfarer were in sight.

Here we parted, as I resisted all his kind invitations to enter, though the poor fellow had but little to offer me; nor would I permit him to escort me home, as he was weary after a long day of wandering. Callum Mac Ian, the descendant of our hereditary henchman, now supported himself by killing foxes, weasels, and wild cats; for which, as these vermin were very destructive, (especially the former among the sheep,) he received a small sum from each cot-farmer in Glen Ora. This contribution, with a little patch of potatoes, cultivated by himself, enabled him to live; but as Callum occasionally took a shot at other quadrupeds which were not considered vermin, he was continually in scrapes and broils with the keepers of the duke, the marquis, the laird, and other adjoining potentates, whose ancestors, by force or fraud, had partitioned the land of the Mac Innons, as the powers of Europe did Poland.

'My love to dear Minnie,' said he, touching his bonnet in the dark, as I left him; 'I would she were here with me, for the cottage is dreary since my poor mother went to the place of sleep on the hill; but achial, Mac Innon! this is not a time in Glen Ora for marrying or giving in marriage.'

Minnie was my mother's maid, and the object of my foster-brother's boyish attachment. They had long loved each other, and had solemnly plighted their troth by joining hands through the hole of the Clach-na-Greiné; but Snaggs was their evil genius; for with the daily dread of eviction and proscription hanging over him, how could Callum pay the illegally-levied marriage-tax of forty shillings, or bring a wife under the caber of his hut, or ask leave to add one foot in breadth to his little patch of potatoes and kail?

In a few minutes after, I stood at my mother's door.

CHAPTER III.
MR. EPHRAIM SNAGGS.

Our residence, the old jointure-house, now shorn of its fair proportions, and diminished in aspect, since it was built for the widow of Lachlan Mohr Mac Innon, who led his clan to Worcester, was small, low in the roof, and heavily thatched with warm heather. The two principal rooms were wainscoted; the entrance was floored with hard-beaten clay, and above the door was a rudely-carved representation of the arms of Mac Innon, a boar's head erased, holding in its mouth the legbone of a deer, supported by a lion and, a leopard. This uncouth piece of heraldry, the pride of my mother's heart, was the chef d'oeuvre of some local sculptor. The aspect of the house was cheerless and indicative of the decay that had fallen upon us; the carpets were faded and worn; the furniture antique and rickety; there were corner cupboards, where old china, worm-eaten books, bottles of whisky, powder-flasks, bullet-moulds, deer-horns, fishing-gear, teapots, and coffee-cups, dogs' collars, an old dirk and skene, mingled pell-mell with innumerable other etcetera.

Far off on the mountain slope, the strong square tower of Lachlan Mohr (who was besieged therein by the Campbells after Inverlochy) was a landmark for two hundred years; but now it was removed to make way for a modern mansion, the windows of which, on this evening, were brilliantly lighted up; and then, I doubted not, Sir Horace Everingham was sitting down to a sumptuous entertainment after his visit to Ben Ora, while I, the heir of all these hills and glens, had scarcely a crust to place before me.

I thought of all these things—the present and the past—with a bitterness renewed by the recent conversation with my foster-brother. I tossed aside my fishing-gear, basket, and bonnet, and with a sigh of weariness and dejection, entered the half-dilapidated mansion. As I had been abroad the whole day, I sought, with some anxiety, the apartment of my sick and aged mother. I heard the sound of voices proceeding from it; she was expostulating, and a stranger was threatening! I made a forward stride, when a hand was timidly laid on my arm; I turned, and met the anxious face of pretty Minnie Mac Omish.

'A chial! a chial!' she whispered, with tears in her soft hazel eyes; 'Snaggs, the factor, is with your mother, Allan, and I fear he brings bad news.'

'Can other come to us now, Minnie?' said I; 'but take my fish-basket—I have brought a good stipper from the Uisc Dhu and Loch Ora.'

I then entered the little dining-room where we usually had all our meals served up.

I see it yet in memory.

Like many apartments in old Highland houses, its ceiling was low, pannelled with fir, and painted in a dull white colour; the stone fireplace, heavily moulded, bore the motto of the Mac Innons, Cuimhuich bas Alpin, in raised letters, and the grate, a little brass-knobbed basket, at which, as my nurse affirmed, Prince Charles had once warmed his royal feet, stood upon two blocks of stone. A few old prints of battles in black frames, an oil-portrait or two, an old ebony table, with a huge family-bible, an inverted punch-bowl cracked and riveted, chairs of a fashion that has long since disappeared from the Lowlands, made up the plenishing of this little chamber, which was alike my mother's dining-room and peculiar sanctum sanctorum—and the palladium of which, were the old gilt gorget and regimental claymore of my father, suspended above the chimney-piece. He had worn these during the campaigns with the Black Watch in Egypt and in Spain.

With gold spectacles on nose, my mother, a thin, pale woman of a dignified aspect, in an old-fashioned costume, with black silk mittens on her hands, was seated in her cushioned chair, affecting to work at some ornament or article of attire, which lay on a little tripod table. She seemed nervous and agitated; how could she be otherwise, when opposite sat he, who was the horror of the glens from Lochness to Loch Ora—Ephraim Snaggs, with his malevolent visage, perched on the top of a bamboo-cane, over the silver knob of which his hands were crossed.

Bald-headed, hollow in the temples, with a prominent chin, and more of the serpent than the dove in his sinister grey eye, there sat Mr. Snaggs with his truculent smile, and an affectation of sympathy on his tongue.

'Beware, sir, of what you say,' my mother was exclaiming, 'for ours is an honoured line—an ancient house.'

'So I perceive,' said Snaggs, impertinently, as he fixed his eyes on a very palpable hole in the ceiling; 'ah, the old story—the old story, Mrs. Mac Innon! Bad times and no price for sheep, eh? I would beg to remind you, my dear madam, that a certain pious writer says, "However unfortunate we may deem ourselves, yet let us remember there is an eye watching over us; it is a heavenly will, not a blind fate, that guides the world;" ah me—ah me!'

Fire and pride were flashing in my mother's dark grey eyes as I entered; then she burst into tears, and throwing down her work, exclaimed to me in Gaelic, and with all the spirit of the olden time—

'My son, God has sent you here in a lucky hour! I have come of a race that have smiled often in the face of death—why then, do I weep before this wretched worm?'

'What have you dared to say, Mr. Snaggs?' I asked, turning sharply to that personage; 'why do I find my mother in tears?'

'Because she is out of cash,' was the cool reply; 'a simple reason, my dear sir, and a plain one; but it is very little that you do to furnish her with any. I have called for the last time anent the arrears of rent due to Sir Horace Everingham—the new proprietor of this estate—arrears due before he acquired the lands, and I receive still the same unvaried excuses, about sheep with the rot, cattle with the murrain, or scraps of traditions and antediluvian nonsense, about the time when Loch Ora belonged to the Mac Innons—and about your great-grandfather who fought at Culloden, and was nearly hanged at Carlisle, as, I think, he deserved to be, for opposing the House of Hanover, and the Kirk as established by law. Now the law, of which I am an unworthy representative—the law says, young man, that when a tenant—but I need not quote the cases before the Lords of Council and Session in 1792 or 1756 on this point, to you. If an instalment at least, of the aforesaid arrears—say about fifty pounds—is not paid to me—to me, sir,' he continued, laying a fat finger impressively into the palm of his left hand, 'then a notice of eviction shall be duly served upon you, with the rest of the lazy wretches in Glen Ora, who must all sail for Canada this summer, sure as my name is Ephraim Snaggs. Moreover, sir, I may inform you, that Sir Horace, by my recommendation—mine, sir—has some intentions of pulling down this absurd-looking old house, and erecting here a box for his friend, Captain Clavering, or for Mr. Snobleigh, of Snobleigh Park, I know not which; and if so, the law must be put in force against you, sir—the law of expulsion—you hear me!'

The reader may imagine the pride, wrath, and bitterness that swelled up within me, at this insolent speech, which had gradually approached the bullying point. I made a stride towards Snaggs, and my fingers twitched with an irresistible desire to grasp his throat.

My mother (poor old woman!) had long been in ill health. Mhari Mac Innon the 'wise woman' of our locality, and other aged people of the glen, alleged her illness was caused by her declining to drink of St. Colme's well, a famous medicinal spring in Glen Ora, where, for ages, the Mac Innons and adjacent tribes had been wont to quaff the water at midnight, as a sovereign remedy for all diseases; and thereafter drop in a coin, or tie a rag to the alders which overshadowed it, as an offering to the guardian spirit of the fountain. Pale, sad, and sickly, my mother sat in her high-backed chair, motionless and silent as if overwhelmed by the approaching tide of ruin, in the form of debt which we had not a shilling to meet—and of avarice which we could not satisfy.

'Mr. Snaggs,' said I, 'you should have reserved your detestable communications for my ears alone, and thus spared my poor mother the humiliation of a moment so bitter as this. She is old, and her thoughts and ideas have come down to her from other times. She cannot see, nor believe, that any man has authority to turn her off the land of the Mac Innons—'

'Pooh, my dear sir,' said Snaggs, waving his hand, and rising; 'if you are about to begin your old-world nonsense and twaddle about Celtic right in the soil, I must leave you. The sheriff's warrants will tell another story next week, if fifty pounds at least—'

'Listen to me, Ephraim Snaggs,' said I, forcing him into a seat, and grasping his shoulder like a vice. 'I am here on the land that belonged to my forefathers—to Angus Mac Innon, who fought for King James at Culloden—'

'Ha-ha—stuff—there you go again!'

'There was a time,' I continued, fiercely, 'when had you, or such as you, spoken above your breath in Glen Ora, you had been flung into the loch with a hundred weight of stone at your neck. There was a time when the Mac Innons owned all the land we may see from Ben Ora; when we had Griban in Mull, the Isles of Tiree, of Pabay, and Scalpa, with Strathardle in Skye. Poor as we are now, we owned all that, but only in common—mark me, sir, in common, with the people of our name. Listen to me, Mr. Snaggs,' I continued, as the fierce sob of pride, so difficult to repress, rose to my throat; 'I am the last of a long line, whose misfortune it has been to fight for the losing side. Our people marched to Worcester under Lachlan M'hor, and perished there in heaps; we were at Sheriffmuir, under the banner of the Marquis of Seaforth, for a marquis he was, by order of the king; we were "out" in the '45, under Angus Mac Innon, and of all the swordsmen he marched from yonder glen, which you are about to depopulate, not a man came back from Culloden—as God hears me—not one. Since then our people have gone forth in the Highland regiments to every part of the world. Some have left their bones on the heights of Abraham and in the isles of the Western Indies; some sleep under the shadow of the Pyramids and on the plains of the Peninsula. In India, Egypt, Africa, and Spain, wherever Britain wanted men to fight her battles, there have they been faithful and true, loyal and brave, standing foremost in the ranks of war, and giving place to none! All my own family have perished in the service of their country since this century began—I am the last of them, and as their reward, our roof is to be torn from us, and we are to be expelled from the home and the graves of our kindred—we, the descendants of the old aboriginal race, who first trod the land after God separated it from the waters, and why? because a miserable fifty pounds may not be forthcoming by a certain day! There was a time, Mr. Ephraim Snaggs, when the cry of Bas Alpin from yonder rock would easily have brought six hundred swordsmen to guard the roof you threaten; and he whom you beard—he, who from the first Mac Innon, has come through twenty generations in the right line.'

'Had you come through twenty generations in the wrong line I would have respected you quite as much, sir,' said Mr. Snaggs, with his bland professional sneer, as he rose again, and smoothed the nap of his hat, preparatory to retiring, as if wearied by the torrent of Gaelic I had poured upon him. 'All these fine arguments about broadswords and barbarism won't pay the rent or satisfy the just claims of Sir Horace, thus the law of landlord and tenant must take its course. You have no means of raising money, I suppose?'

'None!'

'No friends—eh?'

'None.'

'Nothing you can sell?'

'Nothing!'

'Then, take my advice, and quietly quit the glen altogether; there are plenty of counting-rooms, offices, and shops in the Lowlands, where such great sturdy fellows as you may easily make yearly, triple the rent of this old tumble-down place, with its patch of potatoes and corn. Quit your gun and fishing-rod—betake yourself to some honest and industrious occupation, instead of indulging in the very sophistry of vanity, and in wandering about these hills the livelong day, sighing over an imaginary past and an impossible future. No man has any right in the soil but such as the law gives him. Why, Mr. Allan, before I was half your age, I was one of the smartest writer's clerks in Glasgow, earning my threepence a page of a hundred and twenty-five words; but perhaps you would prefer a shopman's place—'

The shout with which Rob Roy greeted honest Bailie Jarvie's proposal to take his two sons as apprentices, was nothing to the shrill cry of anger with which my mother interrupted the sneer I was too poor to resent with pride—besides in its soundness, the advice of Snaggs humbled, while it exasperated me.

'I would rather see my boy Allan buried in his grave at the Stones of St. Colme than truckling to a Lowland dog like you, Ephraim Snaggs! Begone, lest I smite you on the face, weak though my hand, for recommending a calling so vile to Mac Innon of Glen Ora!'

'Mother, mother!' I exclaimed, 'what can I do?'

'Shoulder a musket and march to fight the Russians, if God opens up no brighter or better path to the son of a line that led their hundreds to battle in the times of old!' was the fierce and Spartan response.

'Very well, ma'am—very well,' continued the matter-of-fact Snaggs, smoothing the nap of his beaver, and smiling with his ticket-of-leave look. '"The gentle mind," saith the divine Blair, "is like the smooth stream, which reflects every object in its just proportion and in its fairest colours;" but these outbursts of anger, in the style of Helen Mac Gregor or Lady Macbeth, won't satisfy Sir Horace Everingham; and if the sum of fifty pounds, at least, be not forthcoming——'

A tremendous knocking at the outer door, and the sound of voices in great agitation, arrested the factor's angry farewell. Minnie grew pale, and hurried to open, and hastening into the passage, I met two of the Englishmen and the ladies, with disorder apparent in their attire and alarm in their faces. The oldest of their party, Sir Horace, was absent; and now the danger of the mountain, and the warnings withheld by Callum Dhu, rushed reproachfully on my memory.

'My father, Mr. Mac Innon—my father, Mr. Snaggs!' exclaimed Miss Everingham, rushing towards us, with clasped hands. 'I seek succour for my father!' she continued, trembling, agitated, pale, and in tears, and with hair and dress disordered.

'How—your father—Sir Horace?'

'We missed him at the rock, Mr. Snaggs, on Ben Ora—the steep rock, I know not how you name it!'

'The Craig-na-tuirc,' said I.

'Yes—thank you—yes; and he did not come back to us.'

'Some dreadful event must have occurred,' added her dark-eyed companion, Miss Clavering, whose usual bloom was blanched and gone; 'so many accidents—'

'Get us some aid, my good man,' said her brother, a tall and soldier-like fellow, with a heavy black moustache and a dragoon air; 'ropes, poles, and a couple of stable-lanterns, if you have such things. We must make a search after the old gentleman—come Snobleigh, my boy, look sharp!'

'Oh-aw-yaas,' drawled his companion, who had a very used-up air, and wore a short-tailed tartan shooting-jacket, an eye-glass, a cigar in his mouth, and a faint moustache under his snub nose; 'young fellow, eh-aw-aw, what is your name?'

'Glen Ora,' said my mother, interrupting me, and half springing from her chair, irate at his nonchalance.

'Aw—odd—very, Mr. Glen Ora; you'll look aftaw the ladies, whom we shall leave here in your chawge.'

'I am master here, at least,' said I, haughtily; 'Snaggs, hand chairs—see to the ladies, while I go to the Craig-na-tuirc, to search for Sir Horace.'

'Oh thank you—bless you!' exclaimed Miss Everingham, grasping my arm; 'all my trust is in you, Allan.'

'Lanterns—eh, aw-aw, you'll require—'

'The moon is up, and we require no other light,' said I, cutting short this mouthing drawler; 'come, Callum Mac Ian,' I added, as that personage, whose solitary hut the alarm had reached, appeared among us; 'old Sir Horace has fallen over the Craig-na-tuirc, or lost his way on the hills—let us seek him.'

Though weak and tottering, my mother had propped herself upon her cane, and risen to her full height, which was tall and commanding, to welcome those agitated and unceremonious visitors.

'Mr. Snaggs,' said she, pointing to the door, with the air of a Siddons, 'you may retire.'

Snaggs bowed with a malevolent smile, and withdrew.

'Ladies, be seated—gentlemen, assist the ladies to seats—thank you; be composed, Miss Everingham, and be assured that we will leave nothing undone to discover your father, who must have lost his way on the mountains. They were not made for Lowland legs to climb,' she added, with a cold smile.

Her stature, her lofty air, and calm decisive manner, awed the two English girls, and calmed their excessive agitation, while it dashed the somewhat brusque air of the gentlemen; and, reseating herself in her wide, old-fashioned chair, she spread her skirt all over it, in a way peculiar to ladies of 'the old school,' and then fixed her keen grey Highland eyes upon her unexpected and not over-welcome visitors, to learn the cause of all this commotion and alarm for one towards whom it may easily be supposed she felt but little love, as she deemed poor Sir Horace little better than a usurper, and was wont to stigmatize him roughly in Gaelic as 'a Hanoverian rat.'

I snatched a hunting-horn, Callum threw off his plaid, and leaving the two perfumed gentlemen to follow us as they best could in their well-glazed boots and tightly-strapped pantaloons, we took our way with all speed towards the rocky summit of Ben Ora.

CHAPTER IV
THE BOOK OF THE BOAR.

The sudden presence of Laura Everingham under my mother's roof had, for a moment, confused and astonished me, filling me with tremulous anxiety for the issue of their interview.

Laura was a lady-like girl, pretty rather than beautiful, and graceful rather than dignified, with a bright sunny English eye, a pale but interesting face, matchless hands and ankles, and a profusion of chestnut hair. She had trembled excessively when I presented her to my mother, whom she informed, as rapidly and coherently as her excessive agitation would permit, that Sir Horace, 'her dear, good, kind papa, would go to the summit of the mountain in the moonlight, in spite of all advice and the warnings of various shepherds.'

'The old gentlemen is, aw—aw, rather nocturnal in his tastes, madam,' yawned Mr. Snobleigh, who had been surveying the dining-room through his glass, with great apparent curiosity and much unmistakable depreciation; 'town habits, madam, won't suit this parallel—aw, of north latitude.'

'And he would visit the Craig-na-tuirc,' continued Laura; 'for dear papa is such an obstinate old thing, and we are always so afraid of the gout flying to his head, that we never dare to cross him. Well, we ascended that horrid mountain, and after great danger and labour reached the shoulder or cliff, Craig-na-tuirc, I think, you name it, just in time to see the moon rise above the hills, and a lovely moon it was—'

'Aw—for Scotland—very!' said Mr. Snobleigh.

'We were at the very verge of the precipice, with our little ponies, from which we had all dismounted, but dear old obstinate papa, who would keep his saddle, when suddenly an eagle soared up, with its huge flapping wings, from amid our feet—our wild ponies took to flight—scampered down the mountain, and vanished; that which bore papa accompanied them; we heard him crying piteously for help—oh, heaven, how piteously! And then, a white stag shot past—'

'God and Mary!—a white stag?' exclaimed my mother.

'Then all became still, so frightfully still, that I heard only my own heart beating. Oh, dear madam,' added Laura Everingham, clasping my mother's hand, emotion lending new charms to her winning face and manner, 'do you think there is danger?'

'Heaven alone knows; if indeed the sheltie galloped towards the Uisc Dhu—' my mother paused, for even her strong antagonism to this fair daughter of a man she hated, and against whom all her fierce and antiquated Celtic prejudices were enlisted, could not withstand the charm of Laura's winning eye; thus she left nothing unsaid to comfort her and to soothe her terror. In this she was joined by Miss Clavering, a fine, handsome, and showy English girl, whose beautiful and sparkling eyes, dark hair, and nose retroussé, piquant manner, and graceful tournure, made her, as her brother Tom Clavering, of the Grenadier Guards, constantly affirmed, 'one of the finest girls about town,' meaning London, of course.

'And you saw a white stag?'

'Yes—white as snow,' answered the girls, together.

'Dhia!' exclaimed my mother; 'if it should be the white stag of Loch Ora!'

'Why—what then?'

'It is said to be enchanted—it never dies, and never appears but as a harbinger of evil!'

'Heavens, dear madam, don't say so, pray!' urged Laura, weeping bitterly, and here Callum Dhu and I left them.

Followed by Captain Tom Clavering and his friend, Mr. Adolphus Frederick Snobleigh, who, with their glazed boots, scarlet shirts, and blue neckties, tight pantaloons, pomaded locks, and bandolined moustaches, were scarcely accoutred for ascending the sides of Ben Ora at midnight, over heather ankle-deep, and drenched in dew, or over—

'Crags, knolls and mounds, confusedly hurled,
The fragments of an earlier world.'

Callum Dhu and I hastened round the base of the mountain, and sought the Craig-na-tuirc for traces of the missing stranger. The moon was clear and bright, though obscured at times by fleecy cloudlets, and we soon reached the summit of the steep craig, or Rock of the Boar, and saw the wild glens and savage peaks of the western Highlands bounding the view on every side, while at our feet lay Loch nan Spiordan, or the Lake of Spirits, which was haunted by the water-horse and bull, and from which the Uisc Dhu, or black stream, brawled through a hundred rough ravines and stony chasms, into the deep dark basin of Loch Ora. Here we paused for a few minutes.

The voice and image of Laura Everingham were still before me; for one more fair or polished had never been beneath the roof-tree of our mountain dwelling, and on regaining my breath, I said, with some emotion, to Callum,

'If he has fallen into the Black Water!'—

'Well—he may turn up about Christmas-time—a bag of bones, stranded on the margin of the loch,' was the grim response.

'And we allowed him to ascend—what will people say?'

'There will be none here to say anything,' was the sharp response; 'by that time Glen Ora will be desolate—its people gone to the shores of the Far West, and the warm hearths where they sit now, will be silent, cold, and grassy.'

'But the Englishman's daughter, Callum?'

'Let her weep to the night wind, and it will hear her, as it has often heard our women weep, when the roofs were torn down and the fires extinguished; when the cabers were tossed upon the heath, and the cottagers were driven in fetters to the shore, like slaves for market.'

'But his daughter is beautiful.'

'Dioul! do you begin to think so?'

'Fair, delicate, and gentle, too, Callum,' I urged, warming a little.

'But what of that? she is a stranger, and not one of us! It was not at such dainty breasts as hers that Lachlan Mohr, who could twist a horse-shoe, or Angus your ancestor, or Alisdair Mac Coll Keitach, who could cleave men from beard to breeks, were suckled.'

'What the deuce does all this matter? I would rather have a silver pound in my pocket than a pedigree an ell long; but wind your horn, and then let us shout.'

Callum blew his horn, but the echoes of the rocks alone replied in prolonged reverberations to the sound. Then we shouted together, and again the echoes were our sole reply. The more I thought of the fair and timid girl now at my mother's house, the more anxious I felt for her father's fate.

Myriads of stars were mirrored in the lone and deep blue Loch of the Spirits, a thousand feet below us, and as we traversed the beetling cliff, the stones we disengaged, rolled over and plashed into the water, with a dull faint sound that was long in ascending to the ear.

'By the Black Stone of Scone,' said Callum, with a Highland grin, 'if the stranger has gone over here on the sheltie, he will have a skinful of cold water by this time.'

'For heaven's sake, don't say so, Callum!'

'Why not?' returned my companion, tartly; 'his first threat, on coming among us, was to put me in prison, because a deer-hide was found in my hut; if he has gone over the Craig-na-tuirc it was his own fate, and you know our proverb—Ni droch dhuine dan na fein! Me in prison, indeed! I swore that I found the deer drowned in the moss, though I shot him at the waterfall, and a brave animal he was—thirty-four stone weight—devil an ounce less, after the gralloch was out of him; so every man in the glen had a savoury supper that night. Must we starve, while the Englishman and the Lowlander have sport enough and to spare, and when the poor are driven mad by the depredations of the game on the crops?'

'Hark! I hear voices!'

Turning in the direction from whence they proceeded, we met Captain Clavering and his companion, the exquisite Mr. Snobleigh, who had just succeeded in overtaking us, breathless, and in great anxiety for Sir Horace.

'It was in that direction Sir Horace was carried by his pony,' said the captain, pointing westward down the rocks.

'Dioul! that is straight for the linn of Glen-dhu-uisc (the glen of the black water), and if so, God save him!' added Callum, touching his bonnet, 'for his bones—before we find them—will have been picked white as china by the gled and iolar. However, let us do what we can, Mac Innon,' he added, hastening onward, his natural kindness of heart penetrating the crust of prejudice and animosity with which he had resolved to protect it from any emotion of sympathy for the new possessor of our lands.

'The mountain sheltie went like lightning,' said Captain Clavering; 'its hoofs struck fire from the rocks at every bound.'

'Aw—yes,' added his companion, the great head of the dynasty of Snobleigh; 'I daresay the poor baronet thought himself astride one of Scott's demmed water kelpies.'

The roar of the cataract, formed by the Uisc Dhu forcing its way through a chasm, and rolling over a ledge of rocks into Loch Ora, now broke the solemn stillness of the midnight hills. We reached a plateau of rock, which overhung the fall, and we felt it trembling and vibrating in the concussion of the waters, which roared and rushed in one broad, ceaseless, and snow-white torrent, into a deep dark pool below. Its height was startling; its sides bristled with ghastly rocks, and these were fringed by tangled masses of green shrubbery and wild plants. Glittering in the moonlight like dew, or a continual shower of revolving diamonds, the transparent foam arose from the profundity into which the descending waters bellowed, and beyond which they swept away round the mountain in placid silence, forming Loch Ora, where the black ouzel and the wild swan floated in the radiance of the summer moon.

Captain Clavering appeared to be impressed by this majestic scene, but his companion, a restless Londoner, prattled and talked, and ever and anon shouted 'Sir Horace!' in the voice of a peacock proclaiming rain.

'Stay; I hear something,' said I; 'it comes from yonder rock.'

'No, no,' replied Callum, hastily; 'do not say so—that is Sien Sluai (the dwelling of a multitude). Often when my father was benighted, he has seen lights glitter there, and heard the sound of music, dancing feet, and merry little voices.'

A moment after, we heard a lamentable cry, that was quite different from the echoes.

'Good heaven!' exclaimed Captain Clavering, 'there is some one over the fall—or in it. Did you not hear a voice? There it is again!'

'Dioul! I have heard it twice already, but thought it was a hart roaring in the forest,' said Callum; 'and here are the hoofmarks of a pony, fresh in the turf, at the very edge of the Fall.'

'Help!' cried a piteous voice, which ascended from the abyss beneath us, and sounded above the hiss and roar of the hurrying waters; 'help, in the name of the blessed God!'

'Merciful heaven, it is Sir Horace!' exclaimed Captain Clavering, peering over.

'Aw—aw, good gwacious—gwacious goodness! aw-aw, what a dreadful situation!' added Snobleigh, aghast.

Upon a ledge of rock that jutted over the fall about twenty feet below the plateau on which we stood, lay the unfortunate baronet, crouching in a place where the beetling rocks rose above him, and where they descended sheer below to a depth which the eye and mind shrank from contemplating. His pony had become unmanageable, or disliked the severity with which it was whipped and spurred; thus on getting the bit between its teeth, it scoured along the terrible ridge of the Craig-na-tuirc like the wind, and rushed headlong towards the cascade. In deadly terror, the portly baronet had thrown himself off this fierce and shaggy little charger, but too late; he was just at the edge of the fall over which the pony went headlong like a flying Pegasus. Desperately Sir Horace clung to the bracken and heather on the verge of the chasm; but both gave way, and he toppled over!—sight, sound, hearing, and sensation left him as he fell into the abyss, believing all was over; but the sharp, cool, smoky spray revived him, and on recovering, he found himself safely and softly shelved on a turf-covered ledge of rock, from which an ascent unaided was totally impracticable, as the cliff above him was a sheer wall of twenty feet high; and a safe descent was equally impossible, for below, two hundred feet and more, pouring like ceaseless thunder, the cascade roared, boomed, boiled, and whirled; he shut his eyes, and for the first time since childhood, perhaps, endeavoured to arrange his thoughts in prayer.

Imagine the sensations of this right honourable baronet, and M.P. for 'the gentlemanly interest'—this old Regent-street lounger and man-about-town, accustomed to all the butterfly enjoyment, the ease, elegance, and luxury wealth can procure, and London furnish, on finding himself at midnight in the region of old romance and much imaginary barbarism—-in the land of caterans, brownies, and bogles, cowering like a water-rat on a narrow ledge of rock, and on the verge of that tremendous cascade!

Prayer was difficult, new, and unnatural to him; he closed his eyes, and after shouting hopelessly and vainly, he endeavoured not to think at all; terror absorbed all his faculties, and now were he to live for a thousand years he could never forget the miseries and horrors he endured.

His senses wandered, and while the endless linn, stunning and dashing, poured in full flood and mighty volume over the trembling rocks, at one time he imagined himself addressing the House on the Abjuration Oath, the Scottish Appellate Jurisdiction, or some other equally sane and useful institution; or at the opera listening to Mario, Alboni, or Piccolomini; now it was the voice of his daughter, and then the laugh of his ward, Fanny Clavering. The quaint wild stories of the Highland foresters flitted before him, and while strange voices seemed to mingle with the ceaseless roar of that eternal cataract; damp kelpies sprawled their long and clammy fingers over him; paunchy imps and bearded brownies swarmed about his ears like gnats in the moonshine; while grey spectres seemed to peer and jabber at him, from amid the pouring foam and impending rocks.

He grew sick and faint with fear and hopelessness, for he was a cold, proud, and narrow-hearted man; hence the agony of his mind was the greater when he found himself face to face, and front to front, with Death!

Hours passed away; they seemed months, years, ages, still he remained there in a state of torpor and coma. He might fall into the stream; then all would be over; he might linger on for days, his cries unheard, for the country was desolate and depopulated—for days until he perished of slow starvation, and his bones would be left to whiten on that shelf of rock after his flesh had been carried away by the hawks and eagles!

'Horror! horror!' he exclaimed, and shut his eyes.

Suddenly, voices that seemed human met his ear!

He uttered a wild cry for mercy and for succour and the loud Highland haloo of Callum Mac Ian responded. By a lucky chance we had discovered the lost man, when every hope was dying in his arid heart.

A mountain-ash, the sinewy roots of which grasped the fissures of the rocks, and were knotted round them, overhung the chasm, and from this Callum, supported by Clavering and me—the captain was a brave, active, and athletic fellow—lowered down a stout rope, which we desired Sir Horace to tie securely round him; but he was so paralyzed by fear, or so benumbed by cold, that though we reiterated the request again and again, with all the energy his urgent danger could inspire, we were unheeded.

'Dioul! 'smeas so na'n t-alam!' (the devil! this is worse than alum!) grumbled Callum in Gaelic; this old fellow will have the cat's departure in the cascade if he closes his ears thus!'

'What in heaven's name shall we do?' asked Captain Clavering; 'good fellows, can't you advise?'

'Go down into the cascade,' said I.

'Eh—aw—the deuce! good gwacious, you cawnt mean that,' said Snobleigh, with a chill shudder; 'deaw me—what a boaw!'

'He does mean it,' replied Callum, coldly; 'but that shall be my task, for though his spirit is brave, his arm is less strong than mine, and I shall meet the danger first. It was our task of old—I am his co-dhalta, and come of race that were the leine chrios of his father's on many a bloody field—but I forget that you are Englishmen, and know not what I speak of.'

Even while he said this, Callum had flung aside his bonnet and plaid; tied one end of the rope round the ash, and knotted the other round his waist, and begun to descend into the chasm, finding grasps for his hands and rests for his feet where other men would have felt for them in vain; and scaring the polecat from its lair, and the chattering night-hawk from its perch, by his hearty shout of triumph, as he reached Sir Horace, and transferred the rope round his inert and passive form.

'Air Dhia! the old man is like a bundle of dry bracken,' said the bold Highland forester with some contempt; 'hoist away sirs, and be sure that you have a tight hold of your end of the rope!'

Assisted by Mr. Snobleigh, who was in a high state of excitement, the Captain and I drew up the poor baronet, who was almost dead with renewed terror on finding himself suspended like the golden fleece over that roaring gulf; however, we landed him safely, and laid him at length on the thick soft heather to recover his breath and animation, while we lowered the rope to Callum, who with our assistance scrambled up the wall of rock like a squirrel, and stood beside us again.

'Mona mon dioul!' said he, with a hearty laugh, such as can only come from a throat and lungs braced by the keen mountain air; 'this will be a night for the new laird to remember!'

CHAPTER V.
CALLUM DHU.

Morning was beginning to brighten the sky behind the sharp peaks of the eastern hills as we slowly descended from the lofty summit of the Craig-na-tuirc. We had got our English visitors up to that altitude very well; but getting them down from it proved a very different and more arduous affair: Callum at last lost all patience, and saying that he wished he 'had a keallach to carry the dainty bodach in,' hoisted Mr. Snobleigh, bongré malgré, on his shoulders, and sturdily carried him to the foot of the mountain leaving to Captain Clavering and me the task of laughing, and supporting the crest-fallen baronet.

The sun had risen above the mountains when we reached the narrow path that traversed my native and old hereditary glen; the morning wind was lifting the light leaves of the silver birches, and rustling the wiry foliage of the Scottish pines that clothed the steep sides of the lovely valley. At times a roebuck started up from among the green and waving bracken, to vanish with a wild bound into the gloomy thickets; and the pale mist was wreathing the dun summit of Ben Ora.

A flood of amber glory rolled along the hills, lighting up in quick succession each rocky peak and heath-clad cone, and filling all the glens with warmth as the sun arose; and Callum Dhu, whose mind was full of the ancient usages and superstitions of the Gael, raised his bonnet with reverence to the god of day.

''Pon my soul, you are a rum one!' exclaimed Mr. Snobleigh, as he was set on the ground again; 'but—aw—aw—fine fellow after all; we owe you I don't know how much for your bravery, and I for this canter down hill,' he added, unclasping his porte-monnaie.

'I am neither a horse nor a servant,' said Callum, with a dark expression in his eye.

Now that Sir Horace was free from danger, and felt somewhat mollified towards mankind in the Highlands generally, every bitter thought which the teachings of my Celtic mother, the precepts of my nurse, and the example of Callum could inspire, returned with renewed vigour to my breast; and on reaching the rugged bridle-road, with a haughty, hostile, and distant aspect, I touched my bonnet, and on seeing the baronet's carriage approaching (together with Mr. Snaggs on a trotting mountain garron), was about to withdraw, when Clavering politely requested me to stay.

On the patrimonial estate of my forefathers, I found myself regarded as little better than a shepherd, and treated by these pampered strangers as a mere gilly, trapper, or bush-beater; and my fiery spirit revolted within me, on reflecting that the poor attire Callum and myself wore, declared us to be little better. But find, if you may, a Birmingham baronet, or a cotton lord, whose titles came with the Reform Bill, who will acknowledge that a Scottish chief whose name and lineage may be coeval with Old King Cole, or the Wars of Fingal, can be equal to his own.

The carriage halted; a liveried lacquey sprang from the rumble, banged down the steps, and opened the door, on which Laura Everingham and Fanny Clavering alighted to welcome and embrace Sir Horace, who received this demonstration with the proper and well-bred frigidity of one who abhorred 'a scene;' but his daughter hung upon his neck, calling him her 'dear papa—her own papa,' while observing with alarm that he trembled excessively, his whole nervous system being seriously shaken, as well it might.

'You are ill, dear papa!' said Laura, regarding him anxiously.

'A draught from St. Colme's well might do him good,' said Callum Dhu; 'but perhaps he has water enough in him already—and so, a good sup of whisky—'

'Right,' said Captain Clavering, searching in the pocket of the carriage, and producing a flask of brandy, a 'nip' from which greatly revived the old gentleman, who, in a few words, made his daughter and her friend acquainted with the danger he had run, and the courage by which he had been rescued.

'So you see, Mr. Snaggs,' said the baronet, 'our Celt here, with the beard like a French sapeur, has been to me a real friend.'

'Glad to hear it, Sir Horace,' mumbled Snaggs with one of his detestable smiles; 'but how seldom do we find one—what is it the divine Blair saith, Mr. Snobleigh?'

'Eh—aw—don't know, really.'

'It is this, my dear sir; "there is a friend that loveth at all times and a brother that is born for adversity. Thine own friend, and thy father's friend, forsake not."'

'Aw—vewy good—devilish good, indeed!'

Miss Everingham, while her pale cheek glowed, and then grew pale again, fixed her bright eyes, full of tears, and gratitude upon Callum and me, and while touching our hands, timidly, exclaimed,

'Oh, how shall we ever thank you—how repay this!'

'Aw—aw—'pon my soul, that is just what I have been thinking of,' said Snobleigh, who 'mouthed' his words as if he had been reared in the Scottish law courts, where we may daily hear the most astounding and miraculous English that tongue can utter.

My heart throbbed; a new and undefinable emotion thrilled through me, at the touch of Laura's soft and pretty hands, and the truthful, thankful, and earnest glance of her soft blue English eyes.

'Ah, that devil of a pony!' sighed Sir Horace; 'I hope its neck was broken at the cascade. Egad! it started off with me as if it had been running for the Ascot Cup!'

'So did all our cattle. How lucky that we were dismounted!' observed Miss Clavering.

'It was like the Start for the Derby,' laughed her brother.

'Or the Doncaster Cup and Saucer,' added Snobleigh, 'Sir Horace leading the way.'

'But it is time we were moving,' said that personage. 'Come—you, sir, to whom I owe so much—what is your name?'

'Callum Dhu Mac Ian.'

'Ah, well; get into the rumble, and come with us to Glen Ora House, and you shall have lunch and a good bottle of wine with the butler.'

'I do not lunch, neither do I dine with lacqueys,' replied Callum, proudly.

'Whew! aw—I see—these Highland fellows are all alike. Clavering, have you any money about you?'

The captain handed his purse to the baronet, who took from it, and from his own, the gold they contained, and turning to Callum, said—

'My good fellow, here are fifteen sovereigns; but you will call on me at Glen Ora House, and bring your friend with you; new coats and shoes, &c., are at your service; but what the devil is the matter with you?'

'Monna, mon dioul! is it money you would offer me?' asked Callum, as he drew himself up with the air of an Indian king; 'so you value your life at fifteen dirty guineas?'

'How, fellow; do you really wish more?'

'More!' reiterated Callum, fiercely; 'I am a poor man, who, when I lie down at night, thank God that one other day is passed, though I know not where the food of to-morrow may come from. The hills teem with game, and the rivers are alive with fish; yet I dare neither shoot one nor net the other. But keep your gold, Sir Horace. Every coin of it is accursed, for it has come to you through the filthy hands of your factor, and every groat of it is stained by the sweat—the tears—the blood of the Highlanders of Glen Ora, from whom it has been extorted and torn by Ephraim Snaggs, that merciless and rapacious oppressor of the poor!'

Sir Horace stared at this outburst, which Callum Mac Ian, notwithstanding his sharp Celtic accent, and Gaelic being his native language, spoke in good English, and with all the purity and fluency of an educated Highlander. The factor, who was close by muttered something about 'an insolent idle poacher;' but Captain Clavering patted Callum on the shoulder, and exclaimed, in his jolly off-hand way,

'You are a trump! ha, ha, ha—'pon my soul, I like this!'

'You are the most puzzling fellow imaginable!' said Sir Horace, who had now recovered his self-possession, and with it his usual bearing, which was cold, pompous, selfish, and aristocratic (I am sorry to add, ungrateful); he added, 'would your friend take the money?'

The expression of my eye, I presume, startled him, for he asked,

'Who are you, sir, may I ask?'

'Alan Mac Innon,' I replied briefly.

'The idle, roving son of a poor widow,' suggested the amiable Mr. Snaggs, with a dark look.

'Widow of the last Glen Ora, Captain of Grenadiers in the Black Watch,' said Callum, sharply; 'Co-dhalta,' he added to me, in Gaelic—'be not offended—they are strangers, and know no better.'

'Well, well, I must leave to our sermon-quoting friend, Mr. Snaggs, the task of rewarding you, for, egad, I know not how to treat you,' said Sir Horace, turning towards the carriage and handing in Miss Clavering and his daughter Laura; 'but give them a dram, Clavering—it will be acceptable all round, I have no doubt.'

Callum Dhu produced from his jacket pocket a silver-rimmed quaigh, which had belonged to the ill-fated Mac Ian of the '45, and from which it was averred Prionse Tearlach himself had drunk. The captain filled it with brandy for me, and I drank and bowed to all. It was refilled for my foster-brother, who, while lifting his bonnet, bowed politely to the strangers, and then turning to me, added,

'Mo Cheann Chinnidh-sa! Beannachd Dhe' oirbh!' (i.e., My own chief—God bless you!')

My heart swelled; his chief! and I had no right to the soil, beyond the dust that adhered to my shoes; yet Callum's respect for me was as great as if I possessed all the lands of the Siol nan Alpin.

'Egad, this is like some of the things I have read of in the Scotch novels,' said Sir Horace, with a supercilious smile; 'is it not, Laura?'

'Exactly, papa.'

'If I had only my sketch-book here,' added her friend.

'Aw—yaas—vewy good,' drawled Mr. Snobleigh, as he applied a vesta to his meerschaum; 'here we have a couple of bare-legged Sawney Beans, and all we want is a witch with a caldron—

"Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake:
Eye of newt and toe of frawg,
Wool of bat and tongue of dawg,"

and all that sort of thing—a brownie—aw-aw—a black dwarf, and so forth; eh, Miss Everingham?'

'Anything you please, Mr. Snobleigh, now that dear papa is safe.'

'Safe,' added the frank Tom Clavering; 'but for our brave and sturdy friends, he had now perhaps been at the bottom of yonder lock—or loch, as they call it.'

'It is a bit of romance, Laura, love,' said Miss Clavering, with one of her brightest smiles; 'do not the place, the costume, and the whole affair, remind you of—what is it—you remember the book, Mr. Snobleigh?'

'Eh—aw, yaas,' was the languid reply; 'but do you admire the costume, eh? I was once nearly dispensing with the superfluous luxury of pantaloons myself, and, aw-aw, exchanging from the Grenadier Gawds into an 'Ighland corps, which threw us into the shade in the Phoenix Pawk.'

'The deuce you were,' said Clavering; 'that would be to commence the sliding-scale, Snob, my boy; from the Guards to the line, and from thence'—

'Eh—aw—to the dawgs.'

'You are a noble fellow,' said Laura Everingham to Callum; 'and I shall never, never forget you!'

Callum bowed.

'Give my dearest love to Mrs. Mac Innon—the kind old lady your mother,' she added to me; 'and say that I shall ever remember her kindness—poor dear old thing—and she so ill too!'

'Aw—Snaggs, old fellow—do you think she has any knowledge of the aw—aw—second sight?'

'Why?' inquired Snaggs, with a furtive glance at me.

'I have made up a devilish heavy book on the Derby, and wondaw rathaw which horse will win,' said Snobleigh.

Snaggs smiled faintly, and reined back his pony.

Although at that time only the half of what this fine gentleman said was understood by me, I gave him a glance so furious, that after attempting to survey me coolly through his glass for a second, he grew pale, smiled, and looked another way.

At last, the baronet grew weary of all this; he pocketed his purse, and stepped into the carriage; his friends found seats also—the steps were shut up—the door closed, and with its varnished wheels flashing in the morning sun, away it bowled, the horses, two fine bays, at a rapid trot, and Snaggs spurring furiously behind. Callum and I were left on the narrow mountain-path with saddened, humbled, and irritated hearts, that smarted and rebelled under the loftiness of tone which the possession of 'a little filthy lucre,' enabled these blasé voluptuaries to assume towards us, who were the old hereditary sons of the soil.

'I would ask you to my hut,' said Callum, 'but for three days no food has been there.'

'Come, Callum—come with me, and though I have but little to offer, that little shall be shared with you and a thousand welcomes to it,' said I, and we turned our steps together homeward.

CHAPTER VI.
WHICH TREATS OF MANY THINGS.

I have said that Laura Everingham was pretty rather than beautiful, and graceful rather than dignified. I may add, that she was winning rather than witty; but her friend Miss Clavering was both beautiful and brilliant; and frequently as I had seen both these attractive English girls, it was Laura, whose gentleness, voice, and face, made the most vivid impression on me; and thus, with my mind full of her image, I returned slowly and thoughtfully towards the old jointure-house of Glen Ora.

Three weeks passed away.

The great service we, or Callum, rather, had rendered to Sir Horace, was forgotten, for the adventures of that night had given the baronet a violent and all-absorbing fit of the gout, and a fever which confined him to bed; and amid his friends, the luxuries which surrounded him, and the frivolities of fashionable life, he forgot that save for the fearless heart and strong arm of Mac Ian he must have perished by the waters of the Uisc Dhu, without leaving, perhaps, a trace of his fate behind. And poor Callum—he whose Spartan virtue had declined the proffered reward—was often almost starving; for his little crop had failed; his patches of wheat and potatoes were blighted, though carefully reared on the sunny side of Ben Ora; and, like others in the glen, he anticipated with sorrow and anxiety the usual visit of the pious and uncompromising Snaggs when the term-time arrived.

My poor mother's health was failing fast, and as it failed, her spirit sank. She lacked many comforts which I was without the means of procuring; and though old Mhari and her niece Minnie were unwearying and unremitting in their kindness and ministry, she seemed to be dying literally by inches, yet without any visible ailment—a painful and a terrible contemplation for me, who, except the people in the glen, and the ties of blood old Highland custom and tradition gave between us, had not another relative in the world; for all my kindred—ay more than thirty of them—had died, as I have said, in the service of their country.

She was passing away from among us, and now, for her sake, I regretted that my foster-brother had not stooped to avail himself of the reward proffered by Sir Horace; for even that small sum would have been at her service, as honest Callum Mac Ian loved and revered her as if she had been his own mother.

With such sad, bitter, and humiliating reflections, the memory of the winning smile, the thankful glance, and soft pretty manner of Laura Everingham, struggled hard for mastery; but as weeks rolled on, these pleasing recollections gave place to a just emotion of anger, at what I deemed her cold and haughty neglect of my mother, whom she had neither visited nor invited to the new house of Glen Ora. Vague suspicions floated in my mind that Snaggs the factor was in some degree to blame for this apparent discourtesy, and these surmises afterwards proved to be correct. Moreover, the moustached Captain Clavering, and his perfumed friend, Mr. Adolphus Frederick Snobleigh, whom we saw shooting and deer-stalking on the hill sides, usually passed me with a nod or glance of recognition, because I was coarsely clad, and to them seemed but a mountain gilly, though every bonnet in Glen Ora was veiled at my approach in reverence to the name I inherited. But this was the result of old Celtic sympathies—the ties of clanship and kindred, the historical, traditionary, and poetic veneration of the Highland peasant for the head of his house, humbled and poor though that house may be; sympathies deep, bitter, fiery and enthusiastic, and beyond the comprehension of a devil-may-care guardsman like Clavering, or an effeminate blasé parvenu, and man-about-town, like Snobleigh.

Once a liveried lacquey with a well-powdered head brought a beautiful bouquet of flowers 'with Miss Everingham's love to Mrs. Captain Mac Innon;' but as this knock-knee'd gentleman in the red plush inexpressibles was over-attentive to our pretty Minnie, her lover Callum flung him out of the front door, and tore his livery; and such was the report made by Mr. Jeames Toodles of his reception at the old jointure-house, that no more messages came from the family of Sir Horace.

Now came the crisis in the fortunes of the cottars of Glen Ora. The postman who travelled once weekly over the mountains, and bore the letters for the district, in a leathern bag strapped across his back, brought for each resident, myself included, a notice that Mr. Ephraim Snaggs would be in the glen on a certain day, to hold a rent-court, and collect the arrears; with a brief intimation, that if all demands were not satisfied in full, the houses would be destroyed, and the people driven off. That night, there went a wail of lamentation through the glen; the women wept, and the men gazed about them with the sullen apathy in which a despairing mariner may see his ship going down into the ocean, for there were neither remedy nor mercy to be expected. Our people were able to live comfortably in the glen, as for ages their forefathers had done, marrying and giving in marriage—increasing and multiplying, till their corn patches and little green cottages dotted all the mountain slopes; but curbed by the game-laws, and thence deprived of those substitutes by which nature replaced the sterility of the soil—ruined by the wanton destruction of the kelp manufacture, and by having their rents doubled, tripled, and quadrupled with the deliberate intention that they should be unable to pay them, and hence afford to the feudal lord of the land a LEGAL EXCUSE for sweeping them to the sea-shore, that the glens may be made a wilderness for game, and their hearths a lair for the deer, the fox, and the wild cat—the peasantry found themselves helpless! And thus it is, that in virtue of a fragment of sheepskin, we find men in Scotland, exerting over their fellow-men a murderous and inhuman tyranny; such as was never wielded by the worst feudal despots in the middle ages of Germany, or in the present days of Russia. But to resume my story:

In addition to our little household, we had now to support Callum Dhu, who had been afflicted by a sickness—I verily believe, the result of mere want and privation, for he was too proud to acknowledge, that occasionally days elapsed without his fast being broken. He was entitled to four hundred merks Scots, and a good dram for every fox's head; but as he was weak and ailing, the foxes got into places beyond his reach, and rabbits became scarce. We could not see Callum starve; for never did brother love brother more sincerely than my fosterer loved me; and but for this sentiment, and his ardent regard for Minnie and his native glen, the poor fellow had long since abandoned his hut, and joined one of our eight Highland regiments.

Now came 'the day—the great, the eventful day,' when Snaggs the factor, accompanied by his clerk (the latter custodier of a wooden box and a green-baize bag), both on trotting Highland garrons, appeared at the lower entrance of the glen, their advance into which was witnessed by the cottars with greater excitement, and certainly far more terror than their forefathers, when beholding the Sliochd Dhiarmed an Tuirc, numbering a thousand swordsmen under Black Colin of Rhodez, march through the same pass against the Mac Innons of Glen Ora, and the Mac Intyres of Glen O.

And now, with the reader's permission, I will devote a short paragraph to Mr. Snaggs.

He was externally a very religious man, and grave in his deportment, being an elder of a dissenting kirk. Having been bred to the law in Edinburgh, he spoke with an extremely English accent, as nothing Scottish is much in vogue about 'the Parliament House;' for unfortunately, the language which our Lowlanders received from their brave ancestors who came from the Cimbric Chersonese—a language in which the sweetest of our poets have sung—the language spoken by Mary Queen of Scots, in which Knox preached, and all our laws are written, is voted vulgar by the growing 'snobbishness' of the Scottish people themselves—excuse the term pray, but I know of none more suitable—hence Mr. Snaggs spoke with a marvellous accent, and it would have been quite in vain to quote to such as he the words of honest Ninian Wingate, when he warned John Knox—'Gif ye throw curiositie of novationis hes forgot our auld plane Scottis qwhilk your mither lernit you, in tymes coming I sall wryt to yow my mynd in Latin, for I am nocht acquynt with your Southeron.' Mr. Snaggs went to kirk thrice on Sunday; he was a member of various tract-distributing societies, and always wore a white neckcloth, and scrupulously accurate suit of black; he was a great believer in whisky-toddy and the patriotism of the Lord Advocate. Honesty and charity were ever in his mouth, but never in his heart or hand; he never swore by aught save his honour, which was a somewhat tattered article. He never was known to do good by stealth 'and blush to find it fame;' but he subscribed largely to all printed lists, especially such as were headed by philanthropic and noble depopulators. His keen grey eyes were expressive alternately of cunning and malevolence, while his mouth wore a perpetual smile or grin. Cringing and mean to the rich, Snaggs was a tyrant and oppressor of the poor, and led the van of that all-but-organized system of extermination pursued by certain infamous dukes, marquises, and lairds towards the poor Highland peasantry; and he was a vehement advocate for the substitution of bare sheep-walks and useless game-preserves, instead of glens studded by little cottages, and teeming with life and rural health, and peopled by a brave and hardy race, who in the ranks of war gave place to none, and who, although they have no feudal charters, are by right of inheritance the true lords of the soil.

Such was the smooth, pious, fawning but terrible Ephraim Snaggs, who made his appearance in Glen Ora punctually at eleven o'clock on the appointed day. Now we had no longer any hope of remaining in the old jointure-house, for I do not believe that anything save a miracle would have raised fifty pounds among us, and the age of miracles is past.

CHAPTER VII.
THE RENT COURT.

I shall never forget the emotion of shame that glowed within me on finding myself compelled to avoid this miserable worm.

'He is coming! he is coming!' exclaimed Minnie, wringing her hands, as we perceived from the dining-room window two mounted figures appear in the gorge of the glen.

'Oclion! ochon! ochon!' chorused old Mhari, lifting up her hands, 'the sorrows that have fallen upon us would sink the blessed ship of Clanronald.'

Callum uttered a hearty oath in Gaelic, and pulled his bonnet over his knitted brow.

Mr. Snaggs dismounted at the door and gave his green bag to Minnie, on whom he smiled familiarly, and then perceiving that she was pretty, he pinched her rosy cheek, and eyed her with a glance that had more of a leer than benignity in it; but he was always singularly suave to Minnie. Being too indisposed to receive him, my mother remained in her own room, and I—knowing that we had not the cash to meet his demands, took my rod and went to the Loch nan Spiordan for our supper; as there the tarr-dhiargan, or red-bellied char, were in great plenty, and the banks were a favourite ride of Laura Everingham. For Snaggs I left a note, filled with the old excuses, of wet weather, bad crops, corn destroyed by the south-west wind, sheep with the rot, cattle with the murrain, hard times, and so forth. He read it over—smiled faintly, and after carefully folding and docketing it, he seated himself at a table which was placed in front of the house under an ancient lime, on the branches of which many a cateran from the isles had swung in the wind. There his clerk arranged his papers, and while the poor dejected defaulters came slowly down the glen communing sorrowfully together, Mr. Snaggs regaled himself on bread, cheese, and a dram which Callum Dhu placed before him, with more of old Highland hospitality than the factor merited.

The excitement was general; thirty-two families the remnant of our once powerful tribe, all linked and connected together by ties of blood, descent, and misfortune, hovered on the brink of ruin.

One by one, the tenants approached bonnet in hand, and before this man of power and parchment bent their heads that under braver auspices would not have stooped to the whistle of a cannon-ball. Poor people! their tremulous but earnest excuses for the lack of money, though their small rents varied only from fifteen to twenty pounds or so, and the half-uttered prayers for mercy, from those who could no more pay this, than liquidate the National Debt, were all the same.

One named Ian Mac Raonuil had been ten years a soldier, and though thrice wounded, was unpensioned, as there was a break in his service, having enlisted twice. Latterly he had earned a scanty subsistence by fishing in the salt lochs beyond Ben Ora; he was now sixty years of age, and had seven children. He could pay the old rent, but was totally unable to pay the new, which was exactly triple what had ever been paid for his poor cottage within the memory of man. The factor shook his legal head—-made an entry in his black-book—handed to the haggard-eyed Mac Raonuil (as he did to all) a pious tract, and summoned the next on his fatal roll.

'Alisdair Mac Gouran.'

A fine-looking old Highlander, upwards of seventy years of age stepped forward. His tall and erect figure was clad in coarse blue cloth, and his long locks, which were white as snow, glittered in the sun, when he politely removed his bonnet before the grand vizier of the new proprietor, with the usual greeting, as he knew no language but Gaelic,

'Failte na maiduin duibh'—(Hail—good morning to you).

'You have your rent at least, I hope, Alisdair?' said Snaggs, with a grin on his thin lips.

'I have the old rent,' replied the cotter with a sickly smile.

'But the new?'

'A chial! what would you be asking of me? I have the old rent, and by the sweat of my brow and the toil of my children's tender hands have I earned it. It is here. Have mercy on us, Ephraim Snaggs, and do not double the rent. You stand between us and Sir Horace—between us and starvation. He will be advised by you for good or for evil—he is an Englishman, and like a Lowlander, can know no better. You are aware that my croft is small, and that my eight children have to support themselves by fishing; but the famine was sore three years ago; our potatoes failed, and as you know well our little crop of wheat was literally thrashed on the mountain by the wind. All that remained was devoured by the game of the Duchess. I then fell into arrears. I, like my fathers before me, for more generations than I can number, have regularly paid rent and kain to the uttermost farthing—for God and Mary's sake, take pity on us now, Mr. Snaggs. Accept the old rental, but spare us the new—for a little time at least, or eleven human beings, including my old and bedridden mother, now past her ninetieth year, will be homeless and houseless!'

'Mac Gouran,' said Mr. Snaggs, with mock impressiveness, while his malevolent eye belied his bland voice; 'the divine Walton says, "can you or any man charge God that he hath not given enough to make life happy?"'

'God gave, but the duke, the lord, and the earl, have taken away,' answered the Highlander, sharply.

Snaggs grinned again—took the money, gave a receipt, and with it a printed tract. Then he made another entry in his fatal book, and a groan escaped the breast of Mac Gouran, for too well did he know what that entry meant. His cot was in a picturesque place where Sir Horace wished to plant some coppice; so the humble roof, where twenty generations of brave and hardy peasants had reared their sturdy broods, was doomed to be swept away.

All who came forward had the same, or nearly the same, excuses to make.

Gillespie Ruadh—or Red Archibald—Minnie's uncle, was also in default; but Snaggs, who had cast favourable eyes on his pretty niece, spoke to him with such excessive suavity that old Archy was quite puzzled.

Many professed their readiness and ability to pay the old rent, but their total incapacity to meet the new and exorbitant one, which they knew too well was but the plea, the pretence, on which they were to be driven from the glen, that it might be well stocked with deer and black cock. The last summoned by the factor was Callum Dhu Mac Ian.

My fosterer, who was viewed as a kind of champion by the people, pressed the hand of Minnie to reassure her, and with one stride appeared before Snaggs in his tattered Highland dress. He carried a gun in his hand, and had a couple of red foxes, hanging dead over his left shoulder. A dark cloud was hovering on Callum's brow and a lurid spark was gleaming in his eye, both indicative of the fire he was smothering in his heart—a fire fanned by the lamentations of the people, who were now collected in little family groups and communing together.

'How are you, Callum?' asked Snaggs, with a sardonic grin, holding out his left hand, as his right held a pen: but Callum drew back, saying proudly,

'Thank you—but I would not take the left hand of a king.'

'Well then, neer-do-weel,' said Snaggs, surveying the tall and handsome hunter with an eye of ill-disguised antipathy, 'what have you to say?'

'I am no neer-do-weel, Mr. Snaggs,' replied Callum loftily, and disdaining to touch his bonnet or bend his head.

'Pay up then,' was the pithy rejoinder.

'I never was asked for rent before. I and mine have dwelt rent-free under the Mac Innons of Glen Ora since these hills had a name. We were hunters, father and son in succession, as you know well, and paid neither rent nor kain; we owed nothing to the chief but an armed man's service in time of war and feud; so I see no reason why it should be otherwise now.'

'I am afraid, my fine fellow, that the sheriff and the law will tell you another story.'

'D—n both, with all my heart!'

'What—dare you say so of the law?'

'Yes—and it must learn, that instead of me paying to Sir Horace, he must, as his betters did of old, pay to me a sum for every fox's head I bring to his hall.'

'You are three years in arrear, Callum.'

'Three hundred and more, perhaps, by your way of reckoning; but the last proprietor is dead—our debts died with him.'

'Your idea is a very common one among these ignorant people,' rejoined Snaggs, with a smile on his mouth and a glare in his wolfish eye; 'but I must condescend to inform you, that the law of Scotland says, when a landlord or overlord dies, the rents past due belong to his executors. Sir Horace took the estate with all its debts, and the half-year's rent then current, with all arrears, are his due; and this rule applies especially to grass-farms, as you will find in the case of Elliot versus Elliot, before the Lords of Council and Session in 1792; and the landlord has a hypothec for his rent over the crop and stocking; hence your furniture and plenishing are the property of Sir Horace Everingham.'

'Ha-ha-ha! A broken table, two creepies, a kail-pot and crocan; an old cashcroim, some mouldy potatoes, and a milk bowie!'

'And remember,' added Snaggs, impressively, 'when a tenant who is bankrupt, remains, notwithstanding a notice to remove, the landlord may forcibly eject him in six days, as you will find in a case before the Lords of Council and Session in 1756. This is the wisdom, not the cunning of the law, my dear friend, for, as the learned Johnson says, "cunning differs from wisdom as much as twilight from open day."'

'A nis! a nis!' cried Callum, in fierce irony, as he stamped his right foot passionately on the ground, and struck the butt of his gun on the turf; 'Snake! by the Black Stone of Scone you come to it now!'

Minnie clung in terror to her fiery lover.

'Laoighe mo chri,' she whispered, 'be calm and tempt him not!'

'Mr. Snaggs, I am but a half-lettered Highlandman, and know not what you mean; but this I know—and here I speak for my chief Glen Ora, as well as for his people—the sun shines as bright, and the woods are as green, as ever they were twenty centuries ago, and yet we starve where our fathers lived in plenty! Why is this?'

'Because you are a pack of lazy and idle fellows.'

'We are not,' retorted Callum, fiercely; 'the dun hills swarm with fatted deer; the green woods are alive with game, and the blue rivers teem with fish; but who among us dares to use a net or gun? For now the land, with all that is in its waters, its woods, and in the air, belong to the stranger. God was kind to the poor Celts, Mr. Snaggs, in the days before you were born,' he continued, with unintentional irony. 'He gave us all those things, because He saw that the land, though beautiful, was very barren; but you, and such as you, have robbed us of them, and one day God will call you to an account for this. Listen: in the days of the kelp manufacture, we made twenty thousand tons of it annually, here on the western coast alone—ay, we lazy Highlandmen, raising two hundred thousand pounds sterling every year. This work, with a cow's milk, butter, and cheese, a few potatoes, and a few sheep, for food and clothes, kept many a large family in happiness, in health, and comfort; rents were paid strictly and regularly in rent and kain, and arrears were never heard of. But the Parliament, influenced by the English manufacturers, DESTROYED us by taking the duty off barilla; and when Lord Binning said, that a hundred thousand clansmen in the West would starve, the English Chancellor of the Exchequer replied—"Let them starve—I care not!" may God and St. Colme forgive his soul the sin. There were only forty-five Scotsmen—time-serving and tongue-tied Scotsmen—in that House, opposed to six hundred wordy Englishmen, so how could our case be otherwise? Now, this was only thirty years ago, and since then arrears, ruin, misery, and famine have fallen upon the people of the glens; the castles of their chiefs have become English grouse-lodges, and the West Highlands are well nigh a voiceless wilderness, from the Mull of Cantyre to the Kyle of Duirness—two hundred and fifty good miles, Mr. Snaggs.'

'Where the deuce did you pick up all this stuff—this Lay of the Last Outlaw?' sneered Snaggs, with unfeigned surprise, while a murmur of assent from the poor tenantry followed Callum's words.

'I could tell you more, Snaggs, esquire and factor,' replied Callum, still maintaining his fire; 'esquire means nothing now in this world, though factor may have a terrible signification in the next; I can tell you, that these poor people whom you are about to evict—for I know their doom is sealed—have a right in the soil superior to that claimed by any landlord or overlord either. The Lowlanders, like the English, were feudal serfs, while we—the Celts—were freemen, and our land belonged not to the chiefs, but to the people; it was ours; but lawyers came with their feu-charters and damnable legalities, and then the patriarchal clansman became what you find him now, something between a slave and an outcast—a wretch to be retained or expelled at the will of his landlord. The chief was a thing of our breath, whom we could make or unmake; but the land, with its mountains, woods, and waters, was the unalienable birthright of the people; it was their home—their dwelling-place—their grave! The King of Scotland could neither give it nor take it away, for it was the patrimony of the tribes of the Gael; and it was for this patriarchal right in the land that John of Moidart and Ranald Galda died at the battle of Blairleine!'

'And so the land belonged to the Gael,' continued Snaggs, with his calm sneer; 'but who gave it to them?'

'God!' replied Callum, lifting his bonnet with reverence; 'but no doubt, Mr. Snaggs, a lawyer like you will have more faith in feu-charters, and bonds, and bank-notes, than in Him; it is only to be expected of one of your dirty trade; and now I have only a few words more.'

'I am glad to hear it.'

'It would be a blessing for Scotland if you, and every man such as you, were groping among the weeds at the bottom of Loch Ora, each with a good-sized stone at his neck; and it would be a greater blessing if the unwieldy estates of her absentee proprietors were held by residents who would spend their rents—not in London and in Paris—but among the people from whom they are drawn, and on the soil from whence they are raised; and for this reason, Mr. Snaggs, and many others, the sooner Scotland is rid of her fustian chiefs and so-called nobility the better for herself. So much, Mr. Snaggs, for the Lay of the Last Outlaw!'

With these words Callum gave the table a kick, that sent it flying right over the head of Snaggs, whose religious tracts, rent-books, papers, and luncheon, were scattered in every direction by this champion of Celtic rights, who shouldered his fowling-piece, and hastened up the glen to meet me; and relate all that had passed.

CHAPTER VIII.
MINNIE.

Though few men in their senses ever think of consulting Hansard, I may mention, that the debates in 1823 will be found to corroborate much of what Callum advanced in his own peculiar way.

Minnie, who was an amiable and good-natured girl, became alarmed by the sudden violence of her lover, and its probable effect upon the temper of Mr. Snaggs; she busied herself in collecting all that worthy's papers, dockets, and religious tracts, which had been spilled and scattered abroad by the unexpected capsize of the table, at which he had been seated with much legal dignity and assumed benignity of aspect.

'Thank you, my good girl,' said Snaggs, on recovering his breath and lawyer-like composure; 'thank you—I shall not forget this.'

'Thank you, sir, a thousand times,' replied Minnie, curtsying very low, as she thought of her old uncle's unpaid arrears.

Minnie Mac Omish was a very pretty girl; under a little lace cap, her silky brown hair was braided in two thick masses over her temples and little ears, and enough remained to form a heavy knot behind, where two very bewildering little curls, that were the joy of Callum's heart, played upon her plump white neck. Her eyes were large, blue, and expressive; her bust full and perfect; her figure firm and graceful, and a healthy bloom, that came with the free mountain air, tinged her rounded cheeks with red.

'You are a good girl,' continued the factor, slipping a half-crown into her hand, 'and this will buy a ribbon for your pretty neck,' he added, kissing her cheek, much to Minnie's surprise.

'Oh, Mr. Snaggs,' said she, anxiously, and with tears, as the worthy elder still lingered near her, after mounting his pony, 'I hope you will forget Callum's fury, and show some mercy to my poor old uncle, Gillespie Ruadh—he is old—his wife is sick, and they have seven children.'

'The mystical number seems to be the established one in Glen Ora, my dear,' said Snaggs, retaining the girl's hand in his, despite her timid efforts to withdraw it; 'by-the-by, lass, can you tell me how many cattle are in the glen?'

'No.'

'You do not know?'

'We never count them, sir.'

'Why?'

'It is so unlucky.'

'Whew!—how?'

'Some would be sure to die after we had reckoned them; and St. Colme knows we have few enough for the poor people.'

This was said, of course, in Gaelic, but Snaggs understood it, for, pressing her hand, he added, more kindly,—

'My good girl, I wish I had you in my own house at Inverness (I am a quiet old bachelor), that I might teach you the folly of believing in such personages as St. Colme, and in these old remnants of popery and superstition, which warp the ideas of the people, and prevent the diffusion of a purer religion into these barbarous districts. Be assured, my dear girl, "that when religion is neglected," as the divine Blair says, "there can be no regular or steady practice of the duties of morality."'

'But how about my poor old uncle, sir?' she urged again, with tears in her eyes.

'Gillespie Ruadh is long—very long in arrear,' said Snaggs, pretending to consult his note-book, while squinting over it, at the pretty face that was so anxiously upturned to his; 'let me see—let me see—'

'In arrears?'

'Ay, heavily—not a payment has he made since Whitsunday was two years.'

'Alas! I know that,' said Minnie, beginning to weep.

'Now, don't spoil those pretty eyes of yours, Minnie—'

'What shall I tell my uncle?'

'Oho,' whispered Snaggs, over whose eyes there shot a strange and baleful gleam; 'he asked you to intercede with me?'

'Yes, sir,' replied Minnie, with hesitation.

'Meet me to-night at dusk—'

'Where?'

'At the Clach-na-greiné,' said Snaggs, sinking his voice lower still.

'But why at dusk, and why at such a lonely place?'

'Is not one place the same as another—when the spirit of God is everywhere? But tell no one of this; and when there, I will give you a message—ay, it may be a receipt in full for Gillespie.'

'Heaven will reward you, sir.'

'It rewards all who have faith, even as a grain of mustard-seed, Minnie,' said the factor, touching his garron with his riding-switch. 'Can you read English, Minnie?'

'A little, sir.'

'Then take these tracts, "The Sinner's Deathbed"—"The Pious Policeman"—"The God-fearing Footman"—read them to your friends, and say they were given by Snaggs the factor, whom they hate so much—and see that you have all the contents by rote to-night, when we meet at moonrise near the Clach-na-greiné. But say not a word to any human being on the subject, or the sequel may prove the worse for your uncle Gillespie Ruadh—do not forget Minnie—at moonrise;' and with these words and an impressive gleam in his glassy deceitful eyes, Mr. Snaggs trotted down the glen to join the minister in prayer at the bedside of a dying cotter, and thereafter to dine with Sir Horace at the new manor-house of Glen Ora.

CHAPTER IX.
THE RED PRIEST OF APPLECROSS.

I heard, with the utmost alarm, the relation of all that had passed, and felt assured that my doom and the doom of our people were sealed. To Mr. Snaggs, Callum had said nothing more than I would have said, but the chances are that, had I encountered him, my bearing might have been more violent.

'The glen will be swept like Glentuirc,' said Callum, as we descended the hill slowly and thoughtfully; 'swept bare as my hand, devil a doubt of it.'

'And the old jointure-house, Callum—our last home on earth—sick and ailing as my poor mother is, how is she ever to be got out of it?'

'Never alive, I fear me.'

I shuddered at his answer, for he as well as I knew the strange old tradition connected with it.

Lachlan Mohr Mac Innon, about twenty years before his fall at Worcester, had been seized by a covenanting and reformatory spirit, and while the fervour lasted, had demolished an ancient chapel of St. Colme, and with the stones thereof, built the said jointure-house. This was considered an act of sacrilege so deep, that the Mac Donalds of Keppoch, and other Catholic tribes, were on the point of marching in hostile array to Glen Ora, when the influence of a wandering monk of the Scottish mission restrained them. This personage, whose adventures have been given to the world as the Capuchino Scozzese, and who is still remembered in Ross-shire as the Red Priest of Applecross, cursed the deed in Latin and Gaelic, and predicted, that as Lachlan Mohr had built a house for the dowagers of his family to live in, not one should ever die there; and strange enough, though it had been inhabited for about two hundred years, no member of our family was ever known to pay the debt of nature within it; though many who were sick, ailing, or longing for death, after dwelling long there, perished by violent ends or sudden diseases elsewhere.

Angus Mac Innon, who fought at Culloden, left a widow, a daughter of Barcaldine, who attained a vast age, and lived beyond a century, attenuated, bed-ridden, sickly, and querulous, in the last stages of emaciation and second childhood. Longing for a crisis to her sufferings, in the same year in which her present Majesty ascended the throne, she insisted on being conveyed on a pallet into the open air, and, like the Lady May, of Cadboll, to defy fate, and test the truth of the terrible prediction. Four of our people, Alisdair Mac Gouran, Ian Mac Raonuil, Red Gillespie, and Mac Ian, the father of my fosterer, bore her slowly and carefully on a palliasse; and whether it might be the result of fancy acting on a highly-nervous temperament, or the weakness of a system worn away with age, I know not; but to the no small horror of her bearers, the aged widow of Angus expired at the instant she was passing the threshold.

Now, my mother had long been sickly and almost bedridden, and thus though I could scarcely put much faith in the prediction of the Red Priest of Applecross, which had been impressed upon me in childhood by my nurse, the mother of Callum Dhu, as something to be spoken of in whispers, and thought of with awe, yet I looked forward with vague apprehension to our expulsion from the house; as she was wont to affirm that she was so feeble and worn by time, that the life in her was not natural, and that if once she passed the door of the fated mansion, her doom would be similar to that of Angus' widow. A strange terror seized me with this thought, for my mother was my only tie to the glen, to my country—to existence itself!

Weary of dark conjectures, and with a heart full of dim forebodings, while Callum and Minnie were in another part of the house, I entered my mother's little parlour. She was again seated at a little tripod table, with her bible and her knitting before her.

'You know all, Allan,' said she, anxiously.

'Yes, mother,' said I, and flinging myself into a chair, I pressed my hands upon my temples, and then we relapsed into moody silence.

My mother sighed deeply.

What need was there for words to express our anxious thoughts? From time to time I gazed earnestly at my only parent—my only living relative. Age had traced deep lines upon her pale sad face; but care had planted furrows deeper still. We sat long silent; at last she said in a trembling voice—

'The evil day is coming, Allan, when the fire on this hearth—so long boasted as the highest in Scotland—will be quenched at last.'

I bit my lips till the blood came. Poverty had made me as powerless as if a wall of adamant enclosed me, and I could see no means of extrication from our present difficulties.

'Even money if we had it would not satisfy them, mother,' said I.

'Why?'

'Because Sir Horace is resolved on having this house pulled down, and a new shooting-box built in its stead.'

'A little time, Allan—dear Allan—would have made me least independent of this poor dwelling, unless indeed the curse that was laid on Lachlan Mhor——'

'Oh, mother, do not speak or think of that!' I exclaimed, hastily, while half kneeling and half embracing her, 'there is to be a gathering on the Braes, and a shooting-match. Miss Everingham gives a hundred sovereigns—think of that, mother, a hundred sovereigns to the best rifle-shot. I may win them, or Callum, and that prize would pay a portion of our debts; hear me, mother, dear mother! and if I lose, there is still hope for us in Callum. We have done this man, Sir Horace, a service—Callum Dhu saved him from a dreadful death at the Black Water—might we not ask a little time, a little mercy at least, for your sake, mother?'

'No! I would rather perish than stoop to sue from such as he, for mercy or for grace. No, no; if it is written in the book of fate that the stranger shall rule here, then let our glen be swept bare as the Braes of Lochaber. But oh, mo mhac! mo mhac! (my son! my son!) your home and grave will lie in a land that is distant far from mine.'

'Mo mhathair! mo mhathair!' I exclaimed in a wild burst of grief at her words, which I vainly endeavour to give here literally in English; 'even when you are gone, I cannot go to that distant land beyond the Atlantic. There is no heather there, nor aught that speaks of home; the broad salt sea shall never roll between your resting-place and mine. I will trust to the honesty, the manliness, and the sympathy of Sir Horace; he will never be so cruel as to unhouse the widow of a brave Highland officer, who carried the colours of the Black Watch at the Battle of the Pyramids, and led three assaults at Burgos and Badajoz.'

My mother was a Scottish matron of the old school—a genuine Highlander, with all a Highlander's impulsive spirit, warmth of heart and temper—their pride and their prejudices if you will; but honest prejudices withal, of that bluff olden time which scorned and spurned the cold-blooded conventionality of the new. My suggestions or hopes of temporizing with Sir Horace, whom she could never be brought to view otherwise than as a sorner in the land, and usurper of our patrimony, though the poor man had bought it legally, honestly, and fairly at its then market-price, brought on such a paroxysm of irritation, sorrow, and weakness, that I became seriously alarmed for her life, and committed her to the care of Minnie and old Mhari, whose fion-na-uisc a batha, or wine distilled from the birch, was considered in Glen Ora a sovereign remedy 'for all the ills that flesh is heir to;' and was deemed moreover very conducive to strength and longevity.

I was now summoned by Callum, who earnestly begged my company, if I could spare an hour with him.

CHAPTER X.
THE STONE OF THE SUN.

I have now arrived at a point in the history of that acute factor, pious elder, and severe moralist, Mr. Snaggs, which I would willingly, but cannot omit, without leaving in my narrative a hiatus which every dramatist, novelist, historian, and biographer would unanimously condemn. With the suspicion natural to a Celt, Minnie mistrusted Ephraim Snaggs, and informed Callum of the proposed meeting.

Callum's eyes flashed fire! he grasped his skene, and bit his lips, with a dark expression on his brow; for it was well known in the district that two handsome girls had already been wiled by Snaggs to distant towns, where, after a time, all trace of them was lost; and when questioned by their friends (he had taken care to evict and expatriate their relations), he had only groaned, turned up his eyes, twiddled his thumbs, and quoted Blair.

The peculiarity of his request, the solitude of the place, and its traditionary character, excited the keenest suspicion in the mind of Callum Dhu, and he begged of me to accompany him to the trysting-place, to which we accordingly proceeded, and there ensconced ourselves among the thick broom, juniper-bushes, and long wavy bracken, about an hour or so after sunset.

In a wild and solitary rift or ravine, that opened at the back of Ben Ora, and the rugged sides of which were covered by the light feathery mountain-ash, the silver birch, the hazel, and the alder, amid which the roe and the fallow-deer made their lair, stood the Clach-na-greiné, or stone of the sun. A huge misshapen block, on which some quaint figures and runes or words in an ancient and barbarous language were discernible; it was a relic of the Druids, whose religion, a corruption of the older faith of the Magi, had inspired them to worship the God of Day as the essence of fire. Here had the spirit of Loda descended on their souls, and here in latter times the posterity of Mac Ionhuin (or the Son of Love) were wont to meet in arms, to hail and inaugurate their young chiefs; here justice was administered, and the guilty were flung into the Poul-a-baidh, or drowning-pool; here the Red Priest of Applecross anathematized the sacrilege of Lachlan Mohr; and here in 'the glimpses of the moon,' the famous white stag of Loch Ora, which was believed to be bullet-proof, and to have a miraculous longevity, was seen at times.

In the centre of this obelisk was a round hole, through which the lovers of the district had been wont for ages to join hands in testimony of their mutual betrothal: this formed a strong and sacred tie of mutual fidelity, which none had been known to break without suffering a violent death.

It happened as old Mhari had told me a hundred times, and as Callum Dhu was ready to affirm on oath, that among the men who followed my father into the ranks of the Black Watch, there was one who had betrothed himself solemnly to a girl of the glen, through the hole of the Clach-na-greiné. Forgetting both him and her trothplight, this girl fell in love with a handsome stranger whom she met at a harvest-home in Glentuirc. He danced with her repeatedly, and whispered of her beauty and of his passion until her head was turned, and her heart so far won, that he persuaded her to cross the mountain of Ben Ora with him; but her confidence being mingled with fear, she begged of a companion to follow them a little way. The moon was bright, and as they proceeded, she observed with growing alarm that he carefully avoided every stream and rill of running water, and that his face, though manly and beautiful, was deathly pale in the white moonlight. They descended into the ravine, and anon were seen in the full blaze of the moon, near the great rough column of the Clach-na-greiné. A shadowy cloud obscured it for a time. When it passed away, the maiden and her pale lover had disappeared. The Druid obelisk stood on its grassy mound in silence and loneliness. The damsel was never seen again. Her earthly lover also proved false; he married a Spanish wife, and after escaping the whole Peninsular war, was killed at the side of old Ian Mac Raonuil by the last shot that was fired from the hill of Toulouse.

A hundred such traditions combined to make the place wild and unearthly. The path to it from Glen Ora lay through a skeleton forest of old fir-trees, which, being entirely denuded of bark and foliage, were white, bleached, and ghastly in aspect; while the stone was generally covered by numbers of the hideous reptile which is known in some pails of the Highlands as the bratag, and is spotted black and white, and when eaten by cattle, causes them to swell and die.

But enough of the Clach-na-greiné.

Minnie had not been many minutes seated on a fragment of rock near it, and had barely exchanged the appointed signal with Callum—a verse of a song, to which he replied by a low whistle—when Mr. Snaggs, who had left his pony among the blasted pines, was seen hastening to the rendezvous with a cat-like step and stealthy eye.

'I am punctual, you will perceive, my dear girl,' said he, taking her hand kindly in his; 'the broad white moon seems just to touch the huge black shoulder of Ben Ora, and throws the shadow of that grim obelisk along this horrid ravine. If one were to shout here, would the sound be heard in Glen Ora, think you?'

'No, sir,' replied Minnie, with a shudder.

'You are very confident or courageous, my dear Minnie, to venture so far to meet me,' said he, in his most winning tone. We were close by and heard everything.

'Courage is nothing new in Glen Ora,' said Minnie.

'But your people belonged to Glentuirc?'

'Yes, of old,' answered Minnie, proudly; 'the Mac Omishes of Chaistal Omish.'

'A most euphonious name—are you sure?'

'Do you doubt it?'

'Yes—for so beautiful a face as yours, Minnie never came of the race of Glentuirc.'

'They were braver than they were bonnie, perhaps, Mr. Snaggs,' said Minnie, with reserve.

'But now about your uncle's farm, Minnie—it lies with yourself to keep Gillespie Fatadh in the glen and it lies with you to level his cottage to the earth and drive him into a Lowland workhouse, or to the distant shores of America.'

'With me?' was the breathless query.

'Sit down on this green bank and listen to me. We must be wary, my dear girl, in treating with the denizens of this glen, for they are sinful ones—sloth is sin, and they are slothful,' said Mr. Snaggs, drawing close to her side, and patting one of her pretty hands with his right hand, while it was firmly clutched by his left; 'we must be wary—religion is the life of the world, and wickedness is always its own punishment.'

'Sir?' was the perplexed interjection of Minnie.

'I was about to remark, my dear,' resumed the moralist, putting an arm round the waist of the girl, who became flushed, and who trembled violently, 'that we should take care of the beginnings of sin; but as the divine Wilson remarks, "nobody is exceedingly nicked all at once;" thus I might kiss you, as I do now—so might a young man; but I do so, with all the emotions of a father stirred within me—yes Minnie, the emotions of a father, an elder, and a factor; yet were a young man to do this, as the divine Blair remarks——'

'But about my uncle's farm?' urged poor Minnie, in great perplexity; 'we have long expected a rich cousin from India, where, as his letters said, his fortune and his liver were growing larger every day; but he has never appeared—and then my uncle omitted to sow his corn last year in such a way as to save it from the birds and fairies.'

It was now Mr. Snaggs' turn to look perplexed.

'From the fairies?' said he.

'Yes—for after a field is sown, our farmers mix some grain and sand together, and scatter it broadcast, saying at every handful, "the sand for the fairies, and the corn for the birds;" and those mixed grains become all that the birds and fairies take. But the minister told him that this was a sinful superstition—so the crop rotted in the ground, or was destroyed between the Marquis's grouse and the mildew.'

'Hush—did you not hear something stir among these bushes?' said Snaggs, with alarm, as Callum raised, and ducked down his head suddenly; 'pooh! a polecat or a blackcock—listen to me, Minnie; I am always kind to you, whatever the glensmen may say of me.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Seldom is there a time, that I come over the hills from Inverness, without bringing something for you—a ribbon, a rosette, a gaud or a gown-piece—eh.'

'True, sir—and many, many thanks for your kindness to a poor girl like me.'

'Not at all—not at all, when she is so sweet and pretty, Minnie.'

'Sir!'

'Do you not understand me?'

'No.'

'Then give me another kiss to begin with.'

Minnie innocently enough tendered her soft cheek, to which the fatherly Snaggs applied his lips like a leech, and his eyes began to sparkle, as he surveyed the fine slope of her shoulders and contour of her bust. He became excited, and retaining one of her hands in his, clasped her tightly by the waist.

'I have ever been kind to your uncle, Minnie.'

She was about to break away, but these words restrained her, and she gazed anxiously into the eyes of Snaggs, who, therefore, kissed her so tenderly, that I had much ado to retain Callum in his lair among the long bracken. Poor Minnie, in her distress, looked beautiful—her face was so full of expression.

'I have kept Gillespie Ruadh in his farm without raising its rent, which would have been rather futile, as he has not paid a sixpence to me for these past two years.'

'God will reward you, sir,' said Minnie, weeping.

'Cannot you reward me too, Minnie?'

'I, sir—a poor girl without a halfpenny in the world!'

'You. Would you not like to leave the glen and enter into the service of a lady in the Lowlands. I know one, a fine and motherly old dame, whose strict, moral, and religious principles——'

'No—no, I could not leave Glen Ora and the Mac Innons.'

'The Mac Innons,' laughed Snaggs, 'will soon be but a memory here: long ere this day twelve months, the grass will grow is green on their hearths, as it waves on the hearths of Glentuirc.'

'Then I will still have Callum Dhu,' murmured Minnie, in a voice that trembled.

'Callum Dhu,' reiterated Snaggs, with scornful impatience; 'what is he that you should regret him?'

'My betrothed husband,' said Minnie, with honest pride; 'and none can reap in harvest or handle the cashcroimh like he; but he preferred to be a hunter like his fathers before him; and at shinty, wrestling, racing, tossing the stone, the hammer, or the caber, there is no one on the Braes of Loch Ora like Callum Dhu Mac Ian.'

'Stuff! These qualities, lassie, only fit him for the trade of a housebreaker. Better would it be for him if he read his prayers; for as the divine Blair sayeth, "every prayer sent up from a secret retirement is listened to." See, here is money, dear Minnie,' continued the wily Snaggs, holding before her a handful of bank-notes; 'those wretched pieces of paper which cause so much misery and crime, will be yours if——'

'If—what?'

The tempter whispered in her ear, and his eyes gleamed in the moonlight.

She uttered a half-stifled scream.

'For Heaven's sake let me go, Mr. Snaggs, or I shall scream for help,' said Minnie, as a rosy crimson replaced the paleness of her cheek.

'None can hear you.'

'Be not so sure of that,' she retorted, with a scornful smile.

'Remember your uncle, his sick wife and family! Why are you so afraid?' he whispered; 'I will be your protector for life, Minnie, and will open up a thousand new scenes and pleasures to you. Let me teach you that you were not born to live always in this dull and hideous glen. Oh, Minnie, have my eyes not told you the secret of my heart?'

'I am getting quite faint,' said Minnie, overcome by excitement and alarm.

'Apply my handkerchief to your nostrils—this strange perfume may revive you.'

He placed his voluminous silk handkerchief close to her face. In a moment a tremor passed over the form of Minnie, and she sank senseless on the grassy mound of the Clach-na-greiné. With a triumphant chuckle the pious moralist knelt down and threw his arms around her; but in the next moment a fierce shout rang in his startled ears, and the strong hand of Callum Dhu was on his throat, while the blade of a bare skene glittered before his eyes.

For a moment these two men glared at each other like a snake and a tiger. In the next, the frail moralist was dashed upon the turf, and the iron fingers of Callum compressed his throat like a vice, until his eyeballs were starting from their sockets.

'Mac Innon,' cried my fosterer, 'what shall I do with him? we are near the old Hill of Justice—his life in your hands—say but the word, and the last breath is in the nostrils of our tormentor!'

'Let us drag him to prison,' said I.

'Prison—ha—but there is none nearer than the Castle of Inverness.'

'Then let us fling him into the Poul-a-baidh, where the bones of many a better man are whitening among the weeds.'

'Right—mona mon dioul! but few stones will be on your cairn, dog!'

And snatching by the throat and heels the terrified wretch, who could scarcely gasp for mercy, we rushed to the edge of the pool, where justice was executed of old, and flung him headlong in.

'The curse of the Red Priest be on him!' cried Callum, as Snaggs disappeared with a scream of terror. Anon, he rose to the surface, floundering, dashing, and bellowing for aid, until he laid hold of the long weeds and broad-bladed water-docks, that fringed the margin, and after being nearly suffocated by the floating watercresses (of which, I suppose, he would in future share the horror of the learned Scaliger), he scrambled out in a woful plight, and ran towards his pony, which was cropping the scanty herbage that grew among the blasted pines. The moment he was mounted, he turned towards us a face that was ghastly and white with fear and fury; he was minus a hat, and his grizzled hair hung lank and dripping about his ears.

'Scoundrels!' he cried, 'for this outrage you shall both rot in the Castle of Inverness.'

'I will not be the only one of my race who has been within its towers,' said I; 'but they suffered for fighting brave battles on the mountain side—not for ducking a yelping hound like you.'

In token of vengeance, he shook his clenched hand at us, and galloped away. Long before this, the situation of Minnie attracted all our attention, and excited our wonder and alarm.

'Laoighe mo chri—speak to me—hear me!' implored Callum, kneeling beside her on the grass and taking her tenderly in his arms. But she remained quite insensible and unconscious of all he said to her.

'By what witchcraft did she faint thus?' said Callum—'she, a strong and healthy girl—so full of life and spirit too!'

'Snaggs spoke of a perfume in his handkerchief.'

'A perfume,' responded the black-browed Celt, grinding his teeth; 'what could it be?'

'Oh—this phial may tell,' said I, picking up a little bottle which lay on the turf beside Minnie. It was labelled 'Chloroform.'

'Dioul! what is that?' asked Callum.

'An essence invented by a Lowland physician. It makes even the strongest man so insensible for a time, that you might cut off his leg and draw all his teeth without having the slightest resistance offered.'

'Insensible!'

'Ay, as a stone; look at our poor Minnie.'

'The unhanged villain!' exclaimed Callum, swelling with new wrath; 'dioul! why did I not gash his throat with my skene as I would have scored a stag? He had some dark and sinister end in view; he deemed Minnie but a poor, ignorant, and unprotected Highland girl, who knew no language but her native Gaelic, and had no idea of aught beyond the sides of the glen; but as far as grass grows and wind blows will I follow and have vengeance on him!'

Minnie recovered slowly and with difficulty: she was sick and had an overwhelming headache, with such a weakness in all her limbs, that we were compelled to support, and almost carry her between us to Glen Ora. Callum mingled his endearments with muttered threats of vengeance on Snaggs, and as I knew that he would keep them too, I was not without anxiety as to the mode in which his wrath might develop itself.

Two days after this affair, on the application of Mr. Snaggs, the sheriff of the county granted warrants of removal against every family in the glen; and these long-dreaded notices of eviction were duly served in form of law by a messenger-at-arms, in the name of 'Fungus Mac Fee, Esquire, Advocate and Sheriff,' a position that worthy had gained, after the usual lapse of time spent in sweeping the Scottish Parliament House with the tail of his gown.

Six days now would seal our doom!

Such was the result of poor Minnie's intercession for her old uncle, with the admirer of the 'divine Blair.'

CHAPTER XI.
MY MOTHER.

My mother was now so frail, weakened by long illness and by being almost constantly confined to bed, that I dared not communicate to her the fatal 'notice,' which had been served on us, in common with all the people in the glen; but I never hoped that she would remain long ignorant of the ruin that hovered over all, while the garrulous old Mhari was daily about her sick-bed.

The moanings and mutterings of that aged crone, together with her occasional remarks whispered in Gaelic, of course to Minnie, soon acquainted the poor patient that every door in the glen, including her own, had been chalked with a mark of terrible significance; and that the crushed remnant of a brave old race which had dwelt by the Ora for ages—yea, before the Roman eagles cowered upon the Scottish frontier—was at last to be swept away.

It gave her a dreadful shock—our fate she knew was fixed: and while Mhari, Minnie, and the older people of the glen, croaked incessantly among themselves of the old legend of the Red Priest and 'the curse he had laid on the stones of the jointure-house,' my mind was a chaos; for I knew not on what hand to turn, or where to seek a shelter for my mother's head. She had her little pension as a captain's widow—true; but we had so many dependants who clung to us in the good old Celtic fashion, and for whom our little farm had furnished subsistence, that to be driven from it was to tear asunder a hundred tender and long-cherished ties, which few but a Highlander can comprehend.

A little hope was kindled in my breast, by my foster-brother reminding me of that which (in the hurry of other thoughts I had forgotten)—the great annual gathering on the Braes of Loch Ora being now almost at hand; and that he or I—it mattered not which—might win one of the handsome prizes which the generosity of Cluny Mac Pherson, the Laird of Invercauld, and other true Highland gentlemen, offered to the men of the mountains on such occasions, to foster their ancient spirit, to develop their hardihood, and excite their emulation in feats of strength and skill.

'Mother,' I whispered, and stooped over her bed, 'the gathering takes place in three days—the daughter of the Englishman——'

'Sir Horace—well,' she muttered with a sigh of anger.

'Yes, dear mother—Laura Everingham and her friend, Miss Clavering, have made up a purse of guineas (some say fifty, others a hundred) with a silver brooch, for the best rifle-shot, and Callum and I have sworn to win it if we can.'

'How many better marksmen than either of you have, ere this, sworn the same thing?'

'But God will aid me, mother. I will shoot neither with pride nor with a desire to emulate any one; but to find bread for our starving household—to satisfy the cravings of the villain Snaggs, and to keep this roof a little—a very little—longer over your head.'

'And this prize you say——'

'Will, at least, be fifty guineas, mother—think of that.'

'Scorn alike the prize and the donor.'

'The prize I may—but the donor—ah, mother, you know her not; but think of this money and all it may do, if fairly and honestly won; how long is it since we saw fifty guineas at once, mother? It will pay part of our arrears, and win us a little time, if it cannot win us mercy from Snaggs and his master.'

I dared not add that I had also in my breast a desire to appear to advantage before the winning daughter of Sir Horace, and the lingering hope of eclipsing the holiday Captain Clavering and that mustachioed popinjay Mr. Snobleigh, who had been rifle-practising incessantly to gain the ladies' prize. Yielding to the pressure of our affairs, and, perhaps, to her inability to argue the point with me, my mother gave her reluctant consent that I might compete.

She was very weak and faint, and before I left her, beckoned me to kiss her cheek. Then she burst into tears, and this sorely startled me—for it was long since I had seen her weep. Her great lassitude required composure, and more than all, it required many comforts, which, in that sequestered district, and with straitened means, she was compelled to relinquish: thus, when I addressed her now, a time always elapsed before she could collect her scattered energies to understand or reply to me. This prostration of a spirit once so proud, so fiery and energetic—this emaciation of a form once so stately and so beautiful, with those gentle hands now so tremulous—those kind eyes now so sad and sunken, and those weak, querulous whisperings of affection, with the pallor of that beloved face, smote heavily on my heart, which was traversed by more than one sharp pang, as the terrible conviction came upon me, that she could not be long with us now. Yet Mhari, Minnie, and Callum Dhu, all strong in the belief of the legend of the Red Priest of Applecross, believed that she was perfectly safe while enclosed by the four charmed walls of the old jointure-house.

'The lamp may flicker,' said Mhari, with a solemn shake of her old grey head; 'but, please God, it can never go out while we keep it here.'

Accompanied by Alisdair Mac Gouran, Ian Mac Raonuil, Gillespie Ruadh, the three patriarchs of the glen, and all the other male inhabitants, among whom were five-and-twenty sturdy fellows, a few being clad in tartan, but by far the greater number wearing the coarse dark-blue homespun coats, ungainly trousers, and broad bonnets of the peasantry, with four pipers in front (in the Highlands everything partakes of the warlike), we marched from Glen Ora, and crossing the shoulder of the great Ben, descended towards the Braes, where the gathering was to be held, about ten miles distant. Callum carried my rifle as well as his own, and his confidence that we would win Laura Everingham's prize was somewhat amusing; but it arose less from his certainty of our skill than from the fact of our bullets being cast in a famous mould or calme, of unknown metal, which had belonged to the father of old Mhari, who was never known to miss his aim. In short, it was universally believed in the glen to be enchanted. All the glensmen had in their bonnets a tuft of heather and the badge of Mac Innon, a twig of the mountain pine; and most of them wore the clan tartan plaid, which is of bright red striped with green. We brought with us our own provisions, cheese, bannocks, and whisky, which last never paid duty to Her Majesty, as the reader may be assured.

Though my suit of tartans was far from rich or handsome—nay, I might almost say that it was very plain—it was correct, and with three feathers of the iolair in my bonnet, and my father's old 42nd's claymore, having Biodh treun—be valiant—inscribed on its blade, my pistols, horn, skene-dhu and biodag, I marched over the crest of the hill which shaded our Highland glen with as much pride in my heart as if all the well-armed Mac Innons that over followed my fathers of old were behind me; for this native pride, and a glow of old romance, as a poor Highland gentleman, were all that remained to me now.

The summer morning was bright and beautiful; the air was fresh and keen, and we drank it in at every pore; the unclouded sun was in all his brilliance; the pipes rang loud and clear; and Callum, with three or four others, sang one of the warlike songs of Ian Lom. The gallant coileach-dhu (or black cock) rose before us at times; the useag sang merrily among the black whin-bushes, and the mountain-bee and the butterfly skimmed over the purple heatherbells. My heart grew light; I forgot for a time that my mother was sick and dying—that ruin hovered over us; and, boylike, I thought only of the sports of the day, and the glory of our people carrying off the prizes on the same green braes where Lachlan Mohr had routed Clan Dhiarmid an Tuirc in the days of the great Cavalier.

The spirit of those who accompanied me rose also. Even Ephraim Snaggs, his notices of eviction, and his legal terrors, were forgotten. The veteran Mac Raonuil marched with his head up and his war-medal glittering, as he told old yarns of the brave Black Watch, and Callum urged that we, this day, should give place to none; but remember, that the Mac Innons were the head of the five tribes—the Mac Gregors, Grants, Mac Nabs and Mac Alpines, who have ever been linked together in Celtic tradition, as the descendants of five royal brothers, and are hence known as the Siòl Alpin. The Highlander broods over these old memories, and treasures them up as his only inheritance, and they are his best and highest incentive to noble daring in the hour of battle, and to kindly emotions of clanship in the day of peace.

'Blessed,' says Andrew Picken, 'be that spirit of nationality or clanship, or by whatever name the principle may be called, which opens up the heart of man to his brother man; and in spite of the trained selfishness to which he is educated in artificial life, bids the warm and glorious feeling of sympathy gush forth in circumstances of sorrow and of trouble, to cheer the drooping heart of the unfortunate, and prevent his swearing hatred to his own species.'[*]

[*] The Black Watch.

CHAPTER XII.
THE GATHERING.

The day was clear and beautiful; the unclouded sun, I have said, shone in all his splendour through a summer sky. The vast amphitheatre of hills which surround the braes of Loch Ora were mellowed in the sunny haze, or the silver vapour exhaled from the little pools of water that dotted all the heath-clad plain. At the base of Ben Ora, which towered above the braes, the monarch of all the adjacent mountains, the gathering took place. The lower part of the hill was dotted by a line of snow-white tents and marquees, over which waved various flags and streamers. Amid these tents were a number of carriages; but the horses had been untraced, unbitted, and were quietly cropping the herbage, or enjoying their feeds of corn in the background. A great oval space was formed by the spectators who had crowded hither from all quarters to witness the games; the tall ruins of an ancient tower, once the stronghold of the Thanes of Loch Ora, enclosed one end of this oval; the waters of the dark-blue loch, rolling up to the base of the mighty mountain, enclosed the other; and here the red-funnelled steamers from Glasgow, Oban, and Inverness, were disgorging their passengers in hundreds at every trip. The slope of Ben Ora resembled a parterre of flowers, so varied were the dresses of the ladies. Fringed parasols of the most brilliant colours were fluttering on the soft wind; and the blue sunshades and broad bloomer-hats of the fairer portion of the assembly, mingled with the wide-awakes, Glengarry bonnets, and those peculiar tartan caps or crush-hats, which, with the checked coat and 'fast' waistcoat, generally indicate Messrs. Brown, Jones, and Robinson—the thorough Cockney when touring in the Highlands. Appetized by the long ride, drive, or march to the Braes, or by the morning's sail up the sunlit loch, already the merrymakers had begun to uncork their bottles and unpack their hampers, amid a fund of laughter, frolics, and nonsense; and white cloths were spread on the grass, on the roofs of carriages, or any other available place; while champagne cooled in the mountain stream, and pale Bass, Guinness XX Dublin stout, uiskey, cold grouse, veal and venison pies, tongue, fowl, milk-punch, ices, hock, and seltzer-water, with all other accessories for pic-nicking were in requisition. In other places were knots or groups of Highlanders, talking in guttural Gaelic, laughing or croaking over their ills, or drinking toasts—'up with horn, and down with corn'—'the mountains and valleys,' &c., while troops of children, bare-headed and bare-legged, swarmed and gambolled about them, filling the air with shrill and strange cries of delight.

Among the élite of the company was a stately duchess, whose family have long been notorious in the annals of cruelty and eviction; and whose glens have been swept of thousands of brave men, after the artifices of an infamous factor, the oppression of the game-laws, the destruction of the kelp manufacture, the slaughter of the flower of the clans in the Peninsular war, and other Highland evils, had driven the people to starvation and despair! There were present also a couple of chattering countesses, and many old ladies, whose pedigrees were considerably longer than their purses; but who, nevertheless, deemed themselves the prime patronesses of the gathering, as they usually were of the Northern Meeting. Flounced, feathered, and jewelled, with clan tartan scarfs, they regarded with just and due condescension the crowds of richly-dressed and handsome South-country women, many of whom were attired à outrance, complete in elegance and fashion from bonnet and bracelet to their kid shoes. These, our decayed Highland tabbies regarded with the good-nature which generally falls to the lot of such wallflowers, who may, as Swift has it—

"Convey a libel in a frown,
Or wink a reputation down;
Or by the tossing of a fan,
Describe the lady and the man."

Among the élite of the male sex were various holiday warriors attired in gorgeous clan tartans. Some were distinguished by one eagle's feather in the bonnet, marking the gentleman; others by two, indicating the chieftain; but very few by three, the badge of a chief. The principal of the latter, was the Most Noble the Marquis of Drumalbane, Admiral of the Western Isles and Western Coast of Scotland—one whose forefathers had led their thousands to the field, and from whose glens our most splendid Highland regiments had marched to many a torrid clime and bloody victory; but whose vast territories were now a deathlike waste, where nothing was heard but the bleat of the sheep and the whistle of the curlew. In Glenarchai alone, this enterprising exterminator had converted thirty thousand acres into a hunting-forest. He was attended—not by a thousand brave men in arms—but by a few puny footmen and Lowland gamekeepers attired as Highlanders, and a few gentlemen who wore in their bonnets the eagle's wing, and carried at their necks each a silver key, as captains of certain ruined fortresses among the mountains of the West Highlands.

The varied tartans and magnificent appointments of these holiday Highlanders had a barbaric and picturesque effect. Their belts and buckles, jewelled daggers and pistols, snow-white sporrans, tasselled with silver or gold, their brooches studded by Scottish topazes and amethysts, and all their paraphernalia of mountain chivalry, flashed and sparkled in the noonday sun; while long bright ribbons and little banneroles of every colour streamed from the ebony drones of more than a hundred war-pipes.

Beside these gay duinewassals, the poor men of Glen Ora seemed but a troop of reapers or fishermen; but we stepped not the less proudly, because to the same march with which our pipers woke the echoes of the hills, our fathers had thrice left Glentuirc to sweep the Campbells of Breadalbane from Rannoch and Lochaber to the gates of Kilchurn.

In this epoch of civilization and ridicule, when even patriotism, religion, and love are made a jest, the reader may smile at these references to a past, and what we conventionally deem a barbarous age; but a mountaineer never forgets that the brave traditions of other times are ever his best incentive to heroic enterprise and purity of thought.

In the centre of the vast oval formed by the spectators, tents, and carriages, lay the sledge-hammers, the uprooted cabers, the putting-stones, cannon-balls, broad-swords, targets, and other appurtenances of the games.

On halting and dispersing my followers, my first impulse was to scan the crowd for Miss Everingham, now that I could appear before her in my proper character, and to better advantage than I had hitherto done; and just as the sports were beginning, I saw the baronet's four-in-hand drag, the team of which, the showy Captain Clavering handled in first-rate style, come sweeping round the base of the hill, with its varnished wheels and embossed harness flashing in the sun; the captain, whose costume was most accurate, from his well-fitting white kid gloves to his glazed boots, adroitly halted it in the most central and conspicuous place. I was standing close by where he reined up, and then the sense of Laura's presence made my heart beat violently, while my colour came and went again. No notice was taken of me for some time by the party of well-dressed fashionables who crowded the drag, till the studied respect shown to me by the peasantry, not one of whom passed or approached me without vailing his bonnet, attracted the attention of Sir Horace, who was quietly surveying the canaille through a double-barrelled lorgnette. He then gave me a formal bow and conventional smile, but barely condescended to notice, even by a glance, my foster-brother Callum Dhu; but for whom (as Callum himself said,) 'the red tarr-dhiargan had been then perhaps nestling among his hair at the bottom of Loch Ora.'

Near the carriage-steps stood Mr. Jeames Toodles in all the splendour of red plush investments for his nether-man, and spotless white stockings on his curved but ample calves. He bore a gold-headed cane and an enormous bouquet, and from time to time cast furtive glances at Callum Dhu, who, being armed to the teeth, he deemed little better than a cannibal or Tchernemoski Cossack.

Snobleigh—we beg pardon—Mr. Adolphus Frederick Snobleigh—who cantered up on a dashing bay mare, languidly gave me the tips of his fingers, with a dreamy 'aw—how aw you—glad to see you old fellow—any noos to-day?' But Clavering, who had more of the soldier about him, shook me heartily by the hand, examined the lock and barrel of my rifle, and praised the piece; then he turned to his sister and Miss Everingham, both of whom greeted me in a manner so winning and gay, that even the heart of my mother, encrusted as it was by old Highland prejudices, would have been won.

I still remember how my heart throbbed when Laura's soft and velvet hand touched mine; for her glove was off, and then the little white fingers on which the diamonds were flashing, rested on the window of the carriage.

'And you mean to shoot for my prize to-day!' said she, while her sunny eyes danced with youth and pleasure; 'how kind of you to honour us so far as to compete for the purse which Fanny and I have made up. We hope you will prove victorious—indeed, we are quite certain that you will, Mr. Mac Innon.'

'Mr. to the head of the Siol Alpine!' growled Callum, under his thick black beard.

I pardoned her that prefix, which always jars on a Celtic ear, for her good wishes were so warmly and so prettily expressed.

Alas! how little she knew the agony that was gnawing my heart, under an exterior so calm. How little could she conceive the breathless eagerness with which Callum and I longed to win this wretched prize—an eagerness fired by no spirit of rivalry; but by an honest desire to keep a crumbling roof above the head of my dying mother—for a very little longer. And away over the dun mountains, far from this gay scene of mirth and sunshine, my heart wandered to that little darkened room where she was lying in a half-torpid state, with pretty Minnie reading or knitting beside her, and old Mhari creeping and creaking about her bed on tiptoe.

Laura Everingham knew nothing of all this, and she looked so pretty in her white crape bonnet, with her sunny English smile, her blooming cheek reddened by our healthy Scottish breeze, that I deemed her all the happier in her ignorance of the misery her presence—or, at least, the presence and the projects of her father, were about to work among the old race of Glen Ora. Young, ardent, and enthusiastic, could I fail to be flattered by her notice, pleased by the preference which her good wishes inferred, and dazzled by her beauty?—for I will uphold that her mere prettiness became absolute beauty, when one knew more of Laura, and learned to appreciate her goodness and worth.

'When will the games begin, Fanny? I am so impatient,' said Laura; 'look at that love of a horse—he eats corn from the groom's hand; and see, Clavering, such a pet of a bonnet on that old thing's head. Who is she—does anybody know? Of course they will, for every one in the Highlands knows every one else. But who would expect to find such bonnets in Scotland? Who is that handsome fellow in the green uniform, with the enormous gold epaulettes—a Russian officer?'

'No,' answered Fanny, with a droll smile, 'he is only an archer of the Queen's Scotch body-guard, who is to shoot for a prize to-day. From the care with which his whiskers are curled, I will take heavy odds that he don't win.'

'And that tall handsome fellow with the black beard—oh such a love of a beard it is! Heavens, it is the man who saved my dear papa's life!'

'He is my foster-brother, Miss Everingham; he, too, means to compete for your prize.'

'Aw—the fellow seems so strong that he might squeeze the wataw out of a whinstone; and aw—aw, as for tossing that fwightful cabaw—goodness gwacious!' yawned the languid A. F. Snobleigh, surveying the six feet and odd inches of Callum through his eyeglass.

'He is quite a model of a man, Laura,' said Fanny Clavering; 'I would marry him in a moment if he would have me. He looks so like——'

'What we read of in romances.'

'A bandit—a wild mountain robber—and I have always thought it would be so exciting, so delightful to marry a real robber, and be the bride of a real bandit or corsair—oh, I should love a corsair of all things, especially if his bark were a fine steam yacht, we should have such delightful pic-nics among the Greek Isles, and trips to the garrison balls at Corfu!'

'You perceive, Miss Everingham,' said Captain Clavering, laughing, while he smoothed his unparalleled white kid gloves, 'our noisy Fanny has a strong love for the charms of nature in an unsophisticated state. Hence her rapture at the long whiskers and bare legs of these Highlandmen.'

The cold, artificial, and aristocratic Sir Horace, whom the gold of his father, who died a wealthy Manchester millionaire and docile ministerialist, had made a baronet and king of our Highland glen, received all who approached his carriage with the same bow, the same smile, the same welcome, and nearly the same set of stereotyped phrases, good wishes and warm inquiries; and thus he graciously received his facile and obnoxious factor and factotum, Mr. Snaggs, who had been delayed by the ceremony of founding a new dissenting chapel, and who now galloped up on his barrel-bellied and knock-kneed pony, which he rode with a huge crupper and creaking saddle. A dark, almost savage scowl flitted for a moment across the usually placid and affectedly benign visage of 'the moralist,' and admirer of Blair, as our piper Ewen Oig passed and repassed him, playing the march of Black Donald; and then he smiled with malicious triumph, as if anticipating that day now so near at hand, when the war-pipe of Mac Innon would be hushed for ever by the shores of the Western Sea.

I exchanged a glance full of deep and bitter import, with the calm, stern, and stately Callum Dhu; then we withdrew a little way, for the vicinity of this man's presence was hateful to us, and now, amid a buzz of tongues began the great business of the gathering—a gathering summoned to foster the nationality of a people, whom the grasping aristocracy are leaving nothing undone to exterminate and destroy.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE STONE OF STRENGTH.

Having many of my own adventures to relate, I will confine my narrative chiefly to the achievements of those in whom I am most interested—the men of Glen Ora; and even in that I must be brief. In all those athletic sports, which in time of peace were of old, and are still the principal amusements of the Gael, there were many stout and hardy competitors; but Callum's known fame for strength and agility, together with his cool and confident air and graceful bearing, made them all dubious of victory, yet there were on the ground the flower of that poor remnant, who now represent the once powerful clans of the West.

Young Ewen Oig, the most handsome lad in our glen, elicited a burst of applause, and won the first prize for the sword dance, a species of Pyrrhic measure, performed over the crossed blades of two claymores; and he was also the victor of the dangerous Geal-ruith or race up hill, when nearly twenty strong and active Celts, hardy and swift as mountain deer, flung their belts, bonnets, and plaids on the ground, and with their kilts girdled tightly about them, started in a line at full speed up the steep slope of the Craig-na-tuirc, for the goal, a rough misshapen block that marked the scene of some forgotten conflict.

In the broadsword and target exercise the old men bore away the palm, for these warlike accomplishments are disused by the young; but, for the dangerous feat of swinging the sledge-hammer and tossing a long iron bar fairly over-end-long, by one turn of the foot, the silver medals were bestowed on Gillespie Ruadh; while the victor of the Clach-neart, or stone of strength,—one of which in the days of old usually lay at the door of every chief, that he might test the muscle of his followers, was Callum Dhu, who flung it a full yard and more, beyond the most powerful champions of the adjacent glens and clans.

Then came the play with the Clach-cuid-fir, a more serious test of strength.

In the centre of that great arena, formed by the circle of wondering and excited spectators, lay two stones, one of which was a square block about four feet high; the other was smaller and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds in weight. This was the clach. In the Highlands, he who could lift the lesser and place it on the larger block was esteemed a man, and entitled from thenceforward to wear a bonnet. Though much disused in general, this severe Celtic feat had still been remembered and practised by the men who dwelt in our remote districts; but as most of those who came with me were youths whose energies were scarcely developed, or old men whose strength was beginning to fail, Callum Dhu alone advanced to the clach-cuid-fir, and, taking off his bonnet, bowed to the people, in token that he challenged all men present to the essay.

His air, his garb, his bare muscular limbs, his stately port, erected head and ample chest, gave him the aspect of one of the athletæ of the Roman games. Thrice he waved his bonnet in token of challenge to the people, and though a murmur of admiration greeted him, there was no other response. At his neck hung a brass miraculous medal and little crucifix, for Callum had been reared a Catholic, and these he carefully adjusted before he began. Every eye and opera-glass were fixed upon him, while grasping the ponderous clach, and with a simple, but scarcely perceptible effort, he raised and placed it gently on the summit of the greater block.

For a moment the people paused as if they had each and all held in their breath, and then a loud, long and hearty plaudit made the sunny welkin ring: and my breast expanded with honest pride in Callum's strength and prowess.

'Heavens—such a love of a man!' exclaimed Fanny Clavering, with astonishment and delight sparkling in her beautiful eyes.

'Regulaw brick—aw!' added her cavalier, Mr. Snobleigh, whose glass was wedged in his right eye.

'Egad!' exclaimed Captain Clavering, with honest English warmth and admiration; 'this is the mettle of which the Scots make their Highland regiments.'

'Such were our men, sir,' said I, bowing; 'but there are few now between Lochness and Lochaber, who could perform a feat like this.'

'The greater is the cause of regret.'

'Now, Callum,' said I, 'let us have no more of this. You have tasked your strength enough for one day—and remember you have long been weak and ailing.'

'I have been struggling to give pride and pleasure to Minnie, and if I conquer, 'tis as much for her sake as for yours, Mac Innon. She pinned this cockade on my bonnet when I left her, and reminding me of the former prizes I had won, smiled on me, as she alone can smile; for Minnie is the fairest flower on the banks of the Ora. But what seeks this red-legged partridge here?' he continued, in Gaelic.

This was applied to the valet of Sir Horace, Mr. Jeames Toodles, who, notwithstanding the splendour of his livery, his red plush nether habiliments, laced hat and heraldic buttons, approached timidly to say, that 'Sir 'Orace vished that ere thingumbob lifted again, if the gentlemen had no objections.'

Callum gave the liveryman a withering glance, and touching his bonnet to the ladies, pushed the clach off the lower block with one hand.

'Oh, papa,' exclaimed Miss Everingham, 'how can you be so cruel as to ask this? Don't you see that the poor man looks quite faint, after all he has done already?'

'Never mind,' said the baronet, from his well-stuffed carriage; 'up with it again, my man, and here is a sovereign for you!'

While something like an emotion of rage and humiliation made the eyes of my fosterer flash fire, he snatched up the ponderous clach, and after poising it aloft for a moment, while he trembled in every limb, while every muscle and fibre strained and stood like cords and wires of iron, and while the perspiration oozed from every opening pore, he dashed it down upon the lower block, and shivered it into fifty fragments.

I saw that he was deathly pale, when Mr. Jeames Toodles approached him with the sovereign, but whether in anger, or that his strength had been wantonly overtasked, I know not—probably both. Disdaining to touch the coin, the poor half-starved fox-hunter said to the valet, with a glance of quiet contempt—

'Put that in your pocket, my friend, and thank your master for me. Dioul!' he added, in Gaelic, 'does this man think to pay us like English rope-dancers, or the fellow who squeaks in Punch's box at the fair? Air Dhia! we have not yet come to that!'

'You are a noble fellow,' exclaimed Fanny Clavering, patting his brawny shoulder with her pretty hand, while her fine eyes sparkled; 'I shall never—never forget you.'

'Miss Clavering,' said Sir Horace, coldly; 'you forget yourself.'

Then came the tossing of the caber—a tree which is cut short off by the roots, and must be balanced by a man in the palms of his hands, and which he must toss completely round in the air, so that it may fall endlong in a direct line from him. In this feat, none ever excelled a little tribe named the Mac Ellars, who for more than a thousand years had resided in Glen-tuirc; but about twelve months before this time, they had been expelled with great cruelty by Snaggs. Their huts were burned down, and several persons who were old and bedridden, were wounded—three mortally—by the soldiers from Fort Augustus. These had been ordered to fire through the thatched roofs to force the people out, after which the whole were driven at the bayonet's point to the sea-shore, where they were ironed and embarked on board the famous evicting ship, the Duchess, which awaited them at Isle Ornsay, to convey the whole tribe to the nearest port of the American coast; so, when the caber was carried to-day, the strong hands that were wont to toss it high aloft, amid the honest shouts that woke the rocky echoes of Ben Ora, were now assisting to clear the vast forests of that Far West, where the sun of the clans is sinking.

CHAPTER XIV
THE SEVEN BULLETS.

Now came the rifle-shooting, which deserves an entire chapter to itself. The first prize was no less than a hundred sovereigns; the second was fifty.

Laura Everingham and Fanny Clavering had constituted themselves the patronesses of this feat of skill; but though the purses, on the acquisition of which the whole energies of Callum and myself were devoted—in no spirit of vain-glory, as I have said, but goaded on by the spur of sheer adversity—was made up by them and their female friends; yet Fanny by her air and bearing, her energy, in short by the very noise she made, assumed the supreme direction of affairs; thus the gentler Laura, in her little white crape bonnet and lace shawl, seemed a mere appendage to her beautiful, brilliant, and 'Di Vernon' looking friend.

Fanny was a free and dashing girl, with whom you must have fallen in love, my bachelor friend, for she was one who made herself everywhere as much at home as the fly in your sugar-basin. She wore a broad hat and feather, which gave a piquancy to her fine eyes and expressive features. She had on a dark green riding-habit, with yellow gauntlets, and carried a gold-headed switch. She was a showy girl—the pet of the Household Brigade, and the counterpart of her brother the Guardsman, only a little more merry, and much more wilful. She was a good horsewoman, and rode hurdle-races and steeple-chases; a good hand at whist, rather a sharp stroke at billiards, and would deliberately sweep up the pool with the prettiest white hands in the world. She waltzed divinely, was considered glorious in a two-handed flirtation, or private theatricals, where she shone to admiration as 'Di Vernon,' or the 'Rough Diamond.' Fanny could make up a good book on the Oaks, and had always a shrewd guess as to the winner of the Derby; she had the Army List and the Peerage at her taper finger-ends, and knew all the last novels and music as if they had been her own composition. Once upon a time she was nearly riding herself for the Chester Cup; and those who peddled and punted at mere county races, she despised as heartily as if she belonged to the Hussars or the Oxford Blues. In short, Fanny knew everything from the Deluge to the deux-temps, and from the misfortunes in the Crimea to the mystery of crochet—moreover, a word in your ear, my dear reader, our charming friend had some thousand pounds per annum in her own right, and 'expectations' without end.

She had urged the more timid and retiring Laura to club their prize for the rifle-shooting; and now she appeared on the ground with a smart grooved rifle in her hands, to compete with all comers, on the part of herself and of the shrinking Laura, who had never laid her little hand upon a fire-arm in her life, and begged to be excused doing so now.

About thirty Highlanders, armed with rifles, crowded near her, but respectfully waited until Mr. Snaggs, whom she had requested to assist her, called over their names as they stood on the list, and to each as he stepped forward, the factor somewhat ostentatiously handed a—religious tract.

Meanwhile, Captain Clavering, Mr. Snobleigh (who wore a green sporting-coat with bronze buttons, on each of which was a fox's head), Callum Dhu, Ewen Oig, a few more privileged persons, and I, remained by her side, and now all the spectators pressed forward with interest to witness the shooting.

Callum and I were wont to shoot deer running, at four hundred yards, and to pierce a potato when tossed into the air, using spherical rifle-balls; thus we had little doubt of our success; but we meant to challenge the holiday huntsmen of the Lowlands to a trial of skill they little thought of.

The shooting proceeded with great spirit and rapidity, and it was admirable, for all the competitors were expert sportsmen. The targets were of iron, placed against the wall of the ruined tower, in a place which was sheltered from the wind, and afforded a long and level range. We shot at five hundred yards, and though the average was six balls out of twelve, put into a six-foot target, Callum, whose hands shook after tossing the caber, struck the nail on the head at two hundred yards; and Ewen Oig, I, and other Highlanders, easily put each, eight consecutive sphero-conical balls into the target, at an average of four inches from the bull's-eye; and at one hundred and eighty yards broke every quart-bottle that was placed before us.

There was a deliberation in the air of Callum Dhu that confounded the competitors. After squibbing his rifle, he carefully measured the charge of powder, poured it slowly down the barrel which he held straight and upright; then he moistened the wadding, poised the bullet thereon, setting it fairly in with his forefinger and thumb, and then he drove it firmly home. Then he capped, cocked, and placing the butt-plate square against the top-arm muscle, levelled surely and firmly to prevent the rifle from 'kicking.' A moment his keen bright hazel eye glanced along the sites, and while, impressed by these grave preparations, all held their breath, he fired with a deadly precision that none could surpass.

Clavering struck the bull's-eye thrice in succession at two hundred yards: but his shooting was not to be compared to ours; and we were greeted by bursts of applause in which he joined loudly, for he was a fine, frank and honest-hearted fellow.

'This beats everything I have met with, Miss Everingham,' said he, with great delight; 'I have seen the Cockneys shooting at Chalk Farm—the Chasseurs at Vincennes and the Jagers at Frankfort, where ten targets were shot as fast as the markers could work; but these Highland marksmen beat them hollow, and this is in a land where the game-laws say the tenant shall not have a gun. Old Leather-stocking, with his boasted Killdeer, could do nothing like this.'

'All skill and practice, my dear sir,' suggested Mr. Snaggs, who had repeatedly been solacing himself by quiet sneers at Highlanders in general, and myself in particular; 'to allow tenants the use of guns would only lead to poaching and vice, "which," sayeth the trite Quarles, "is its own punishment."'

It was unanimously agreed that Callum and I were the victors of that day's shooting. Elated by the prospect of winning the prize, and feeling happy that I would thereby be honestly enabled to relieve, to a certain extent, the troubles of a sick and aged parent, after a moment's conference with Callum, I turned to Captain Clavering, saying,

'We have shot at your targets placed at five hundred yards, and were ready to have done so, had they been placed at a thousand yards, if our rifles had been furnished with telescope sights. We will now challenge you to a trial of skill, which may be new to you—with seven solid sugar-loaf balls shot from thirty-six inch rifled barrels.'

'Agreed,' said the Captain: 'I have shot a deer running at nearly five hundred yards, and have no fear.'

'Ewen Oig, bring our targets and hang one over the battlement of the tower,' said I to the young piper, who was the son of Gillespie Ruadh, and was lithe, nimble, and active. He took one of the small white targets we had brought with us from Glen Ora, and which measured about three feet square, and bore, in black line upon it, the figure of a cross. With this he scrambled to the summit of the ruined tower, a daring feat, as it was more than seventy feet in height, and there he fixed it firmly by means of a hammer, nails, and holdfasts. We now approached within two hundred yards, and challenged the competitors two and two, to put seven bullets successively into the lines of the cross which measured two feet one way by one the other.

The impatient Mr. Snobleigh fired and missed. 'You keep your head too high, sir,' said Callum; 'thus, in firing, your line of vision does not follow the line of the barrel, and yours is rather more than thirty-six inches in length.'

Clavering fired twice, and twice splintered the edge of the target. All their other bullets were flattened like lichens on the castle wall, and he and Snobleigh drew back, muttering something about the unusual height and range.

Fanny now came forward with her smart rifle, which was decorated by ribbons, and which Snobleigh had loaded for her; she, and some one else, fired seven bullets between them, and one only struck the lower verge of the little target.

'Now, sirs,' said she to Callum and me; 'it is your turn'—but Callum lowered his rifle and drew back, 'What is the matter, sir?'

'I cannot contend with a lady,' said he, doffing his bonnet, 'and more than all, with one who is among the fairest in the land.'

'Shoot, shoot, I command you!' said Fanny, while her dark eyes flashed with girlish triumph at Callum's honest admiration of her great beauty.

'Your will is a law to me, madam. My chief and I will fire by turn—he, four balls, and I, three; and here I must give place to him. Had your hand been as powerful as your eye, Miss Clavering, we had but little chance of victory to-day.'

'I told you he was a love of a man, Laura,' whispered Fanny to her friend, the charm of whose presence was for ever in my mind, and I was fired by an ambition to outshine the perfumed Snobleigh—he who owned a park and hall in Yorkshire, a house "in town," another in Paris; a stud at Tattersall's, a yacht at Cowes, a shooting-box on the Grampians, and a commission in the Foot Guards—while I—what did I own? only my father's name, with the poor inheritance of Highland pride, and the dreams of other days.

'We shall see if these boasting Celts can perform this fine feat themselves,' sneered Mr. Snaggs, as he adjusted his spectacles and came fussily forward.

'Factor,' whispered Callum in his deep voice, 'the breast of the villain who thought to outrage my Minnie is smaller than that target, yet my ball may reach it some day, on the lone hillside, at a thousand yards!'

Snaggs grew pale, as if the death-shot was ringing in his ears. As I levelled my rifle, the betting began. I fired and placed the ball in the black line at the very head of the cross. Then Callum stepped forward.

'Fifty to one, he hits the black line,' said Clavering.

'Aw—done—I take you—cool hundred if you like,' drawled Snobleigh, betting-book in hand!

'It is done, by Jove; right through the target!'

'Lend me the telescope.'

'I could hit the medal on your breast at half the distance, Captain Clavering,' said Callum, as he fired again.

'Thank you, my fine fellow; I would rather you found another mark. Bravo! in the very centre of the cross!' continued Clavering, who was looking at the target through his telescope.

Then I fired again, and lodged my bullet in the black line, a little lower down, and so we discharged our seven bullets, planting them all fairly until the cruciform arrangement was complete, thus—

*
* * *
*
*
*

Then Ewen Oig, wild with excitement, sprang again to the summit of the tower, wrenched away the target, and it was carried round the field, with the pipes playing before it, while we, by three hearty bursts of applause, were hailed the victors of the shooting-butts.

'By Jove,' exclaimed Clavering, 'I wish I could do this!'

'So you might, Captain, easily, if your bullets had been cast in the same mould.'

'How—what do you mean?'

'In the mould of old Mhari's father, the forester of Coille-tor.'

'The deuce! you don't mean to say they are charmed,' said the Captain, laughing; 'enchanted—bewitched?'

'Perhaps they are, and perhaps they are not. I say nothing; but I wounded the white stag with one.'

'Ha, ha, ha! capital—I like this!' exclaimed Clavering.

'Der Freischutz in the North—a second Hans Rudner,' said Laura Everingham; 'but the prizes are undoubtedly theirs.'

'By Jove, how a few such fellows would have picked off the Russians from the rifle-pits!'

'And this victor is our quiet-looking Allan Mac Innon,' said Laura, her eyes beaming with a pleasure that intoxicated me.

'He is a regular trump!' added the Captain, with manly honesty, although he had been beaten.

'He looks so calm and demure,' continued Miss Everingham, 'no one would have thought it was—it was——'

'It was in him,' suggested Clavering, squibbing off his rifle; 'why don't you become a soldier, Mac Innon—there is good stuff in you—'pon my soul, I like you immensely! don't you, Miss Everingham?'

At this absurd question, Laura coloured to her temples, and grew pale again.

'Well—aw,' began Mr. Snobleigh, who looked irritated and discomfited; 'I aw—nevaw saw such shooting certainly—beats Jerningham of ours, and he as the world knows, was matched—aw—aw—twenty-five pigeons—aw—against you, Clavering, for fifty sovereigns a-side; but I'll back these 'Ighland fellows against all England—aw.'

Now came the most exciting and, to me, humiliating part of the proceedings—the distribution of the first and second prizes for shooting.

Though poor, crushed and bruised by biting poverty, I could not, without an emotion of shame, accept the hundred sovereigns from the hand of Laura Everingham, and decline the more suitable gift of a silver cup, which was the alternative, in the case of a gentleman being the victorious competitor! Now in my inmost heart I felt that a poor and proud gentleman was the most miserable of all God's creatures. Clavering's words, 'why don't you become a soldier?' were ever in my ears; but the thought of my old and dying parent, of whom I was the only prop and stay, stifled the more fiery energy that rose within me; and as we drew near the little covered platform, where the élite of the spectators were grouped around that beautiful but stony-hearted Duchess, the canting Marquis, the two Countesses, Sir Horace and others of their privileged order, I felt my spirit sink as if I was a very slave.

Here also stood Mr. Ephraim Snaggs, bearing on a silver salver two purses beautifully embroidered. One was by the hands of Miss Everingham, and contained the hundred sovereigns; the other was by her friend, and contained the fifty.

While crimsoned by mortification, I heard my name pronounced, and found myself before Sir Horace, who, as the newspapers said, "in a choice, neat, and appropriate speech," duly emphasised in the true Oxford fashion, announced that I was the victor of the shooting-match, and entitled to the first prize—my companion to the second.

To accept this money seemed to me, educated as I had been by my proud and haughty mother, the very acme of shame and humiliation; but, at that bitter moment, I saw her in fancy stretched on her bed of sickness, wan with illness and with age, and about to be forcibly evicted at the stern behest of the very donor of this wretched coin—the curse of men, and cause of all their crime and misery. But for her sake I would gladly have scattered the money among the poor Celts who crowded round us, with exultation in their eyes, "that Mac Innon himself and no Sassenagh," was the victor; but I mastered my emotion; the Lowlander's proverb, he yat tholis overcomes, flashed upon my memory, and while my cheek burned with a fever heat, I received the purse from the hand of Laura Everingham, and again her soft touch gave me a thrill that went straight to my swollen heart.

With all a woman's quickness she divined the source of my emotion, and said tremulously,

'Mr. Mac Innon, you have, I think, some reluctance in accepting this prize; if you would prefer the silver cup, I am sure that dear papa——'

'No, no, madam; a thousand thanks for your generous delicacy; but—but the money——'

'Will be more acceptable,' added Mr. Snaggs, spitefully. 'We have a proverb among us in Scotland, my dear Miss Everingham, anent "leaving a legacy to Mac Gregor." Mr. Mac Innon is a Highlander, and possesses, I have no doubt, an accurate idea of the value of the current coin of these kingdoms.'

'Aw—aw,' drawled the vacant Snobleigh, taking his cue from the factor, and whom I heard though he spoke in a whisper, for my sense of hearing was painfully acute, 'I always thought this young fellow wondawfully well behaved for a Scotsman, but aw—aw—with all his cussed pwide and politeness he has taken your tin, Laura.'

My breast heaved—I felt the fire flashing in my eyes, and I glared at Snaggs with fury, while the impulse to dirk or shoot him rose within me.

'Ephraim Snaggs—liar, coward, and hypocrite, utter but another taunt or jeer, and I will strangle you like the dog you are!' I exclaimed in a voice so hoarse with passion, that Laura shrunk from me in terror, while I emptied the hundred sovereigns from the purse into my right hand, and flung them in a golden shower among the crowd, a startling and unexpected manoeuvre, which was immediately imitated by Callum, who tossed his fifty into the air; and thus in a moment we were as poor and as desperate as when the shooting began.

While the crowd scrambled for the money among the grass, a murmur—a cry of astonishment had risen, on all sides, and then silence succeeded.

'What the devil do you mean, fellow, by refusing the money?' asked Sir Horace, who seemed highly irritated that Callum should presume to imitate his master.

'Because I did not come here for money.'

'For what then?'

'Honour—like my chief and fosterer Mac Innon.'

'Honour?' reiterated the incredulous baronet, coolly surveying through his glass the erect figure of the tattered huntsman, from his bonnet to his brogues. 'Oho, of course you have a pedigree like a Welshman, beginning with Adam and ending with yourself.'

'In that case it might be no better than your own; but I am come of a long line of brave men, whose shoes, the son of a Manchester baronet, rich though he be, is not worthy to tie.'

The claret-reddened cheeks of Sir Horace grew pale at this fierce hit, while the stately duchess, the two passé countesses, and all the Highland tabbies of 'good family,' exchanged significant and self-satisfied smiles. The baronet was about to make an impetuous rejoinder, when Clavering said,—

'Sir Horace do, I beg of you, respect the feelings of these people, whose peculiar temper and ideas you cannot understand.'

'Papa, papa!' urged his startled daughter.

'You speak English well—devilish well, indeed, for a Highlander,' said Sir Horace loftily, gulping down his anger; 'how is this?'

'I am all unused to answer questions that are asked in such tones, yet I will satisfy you.'

'Do, for never did I meet an ignorant gilly who spoke so proudly to me.'

'A gilly I am, but not an ignorant one, Sir Horace. Thanks be to God, and to good Father Hamish Cameron, who now sleeps in his grave in the Scottish church at Valladolid, I can read and write, and do a little more. I am thus unlike the poor people round me, who are oppressed and destroyed, without knowing why and wherefore the land of their fathers, so dear to their hearts, is made a hunting-field for the dissipated and the idle of the south country, while they are driven from starvation to exile—we, the Gael, who since the Union have led the van of Britain's bloodiest battles. But I know that our enthusiasm, our traditions, and our ties of clanship seem mere trash and absurdity to such as you, Sir Horace—a cold-blooded conventionalist and man of the world. I have learned to be aware that the game-laws, the loss of the kelp trade, misgovernment, and centralization are the curses of the Highlands—all this I know, though I am but a half-lettered gilly! I know a black-hearted villain when I see one, Mr. Snaggs, and I know a pampered tyrant when I speak to one, Sir Horace, and so failte air an duinnewassal! let us go Mac Innon.'

Sir Horace gave us a glance full of spite and anger; he felt that a peasant had dared to lecture him before a multitude; but now we marched off with our pipes playing, leaving the crowd of fashionables staring after us in astonishment, while the more ignoble mob still hunted for the scattered gold among the grass.

'We have done right and well, Callum Dhu,' said I; 'but think of my poor mother and of the eviction notices?'

'Your mother—ay, poor lady—there the dirk enters my heart.'

'If moved, she dies.'

'Nothing but the prediction of the Red Priest can save her now,' said Callum, lowering his voice, 'unless we defend the house by musket-shot, for if she passes its walls, she will die like the wife of Angus and your great-grandmother, the wife of Lachlan Mohr.'

CHAPTER XV.
THE SIXTH DAY.

We marched bravely and with pipes playing, while we were within sight of the crowds assembled on the green braes at the foot of the stupendous Ben; but as soon as we had crossed the shoulder of the mountain, and begun to descend into that beautiful valley from which we were all about to be expelled, our spirit sank and the wild notes of Ewen's Piob Mohr died away, while dejected and silent, or communing only in low and foreboding whispers, the men of our fated tribe approached their humble homes.

The aged, the women, and the little ones came forth to meet and to welcome with acclamations, and outstretched arms the victors of the different games. The crest-fallen bearing of Black Callum and myself led them at first to suppose what they had hitherto believed to be impossible and incredible, that we hail been beaten at rifle-shooting 'by the strangers.'

When I left the glen that morning, all my thoughts were bent on victory, and I saw only one thing in the world—a black spot on a white target; but now the blue eyes of Laura Everingham were ever before me, in all their variety and beauty of expression.

My mother's feeble voice fell sadly and reproachfully on my ear as I entered her chamber, and Minnie, drawing back the curtains, revealed the thin and aged form that seemed to be passing like a shadow from among us.

'You have won the prize, my dear boy, Allan?'

'Yes, mother.'

Her eyes were bent in love and sorrow on me. Oh, how full my heart was at that moment!

'A hundred guineas, Allan—think of that!'

'And Callum won the second prize,' said Minnie, with a timid blush of pleasure.

'Fifty more—one hundred and fifty! Oh, Allan, my poor boy. God's blessed hand was in this, to save us from the grasp of ruin!'

I wrung my hands, and throwing the empty purses before my mother, covered my face and sat down.

'What means this, Allan?' asked the poor woman, in a voice of tenderness and alarm; but I made no reply. 'An empty purse, you have not—oh, you cannot have spent or lost the money?'

'Neither, dear mother—but pity me and bear with the weakness you have taught me?'

'What have you done?'

'Listen and you shall hear.'

I detailed to her the shooting, and told how Callum and I were the victors at any distance from one to five hundred yards, and how we showered our bullets into the bull's-eye, as fast as the markers could count them; how we challenged all to shoot seven consecutive balls into the black cross on the tower of the Thanes; how none save Callum and I could touch it at two hundred yards—a feat such as the Highlands had seldom seen before, and how we won the prizes.

I related how the hateful Snaggs had been there with musty morality on his oily tongue, and a hateful smile in his deep grey eye; how he had uttered sneers to which (without seeming to commit an outrage) I could not reply. I told her of the shame I endured when competing with shepherds and foresters for a prize, even from a lady's hand. I the heir of an old and respected line, and with all the pride in which she had reared me, swelling in my heart; I told her of the wily factor's taunts, and how Callum and I had flung the gold with scorn among the people, and departed from that great and long wished-for gathering on the Braes as poor as when this morning, so full of hope and spirit, we had marched over the mountains to attend it.

My mother heard me quietly to the end, and then applauded me as warmly as her feeble strength would permit. But I failed to feel this approval in my own heart, when beholding the emptiness of our household—the lack of comforts—yea almost of common food; and I cursed the pride that made me scorn a prize, which though less than a bagatelle to some—to you, my good reader, I hope—would have been a Godsend to our half-famished family at Glen Ora.

Then Laura's face and eyes, her voice and accents came before me, and I fell, I knew not why, into a dreamy reverie over all I did.

My mother's illness and our penury pressed heavily on my soul. A lofty barrier seemed to surround me; a girdle of evils—a boundary beyond which I saw no outlet, from which there was no escape, and which I dared not and knew not how to surmount. Too proud to beg, and ashamed to dig, I became bewildered as the evil hour approached, when the authorities would arrive to evict the people of the glen. For the whole of the previous day no food passed my lips; I found eating impossible, I felt as one over whom hung a sentence of death; a dark, inevitable, and unavertible fate; and with the apathy of despair I saw the morning of the sixth day dawn, when the messengers and constables, or perhaps the soldiery from Fort William, would arrive to extinguish the fires, unroof the houses, and drive the people away.

Thoughts of armed, manly, and determined resistance floated darkly and fiercely through my mind; and I am certain that the same ideas were hovering before Callum, as he sat by his humble but untasted breakfast, sharpening his skene dhu, cleaning, oiling and examining his favourite rifle, the crack of which might never more wake the echoes of the mountains; and our pretty Minnie watched him the while with loving and anxious eyes. There were weapons enough in the cottages to arm the men of the glen, and their number was sufficient to have held against three thousand red coats, the gorge that led to the valley, for there our grandfathers had made a long and desperate defence against the ruffianly Huskes Brigade in 1746, and we were able to do as much again; but the steamers had opened up the lochs in our rear; and though we might have repelled the authorities for a few days, we were sure of being overcome and severely chastised in the end; thus the rash and dangerous idea to taking arms to defend our old hereditary hearths and homes was no sooner formed than it was dismissed.

At night I could scarcely sleep, and if for a moment my eyes closed, distressing visions of flaming houses, and of women and children dragged forth by rural police and soldiers, came before me. I heard my mother crying for succour—but invisible powers seemed to chain my feet to the earth, and breathlessly I writhed and strove to aid her. Perspiration bedewed my forehead, when hands were roughly laid upon her bed to bear her forth, for the hour of eviction had come, and I remembered the widow of Lachlan Mohr. Then I was free—I sprang to my father's sword; but our tormentors flung themselves upon me! My mother was borne forth—now—now, she was at the threshold. I heard a faint cry, and all was over—she had expired! Then I would start up, with my heart full of horror, grief, and vengeance, to find that it was all a dream; but, alas, a dark and foreboding one!

The sixth day dawned. It drew slowly and heavily on—it passed away, and night darkened without Ewen Oig, who was posted as a scout on the lofty brow of the Craig-na-tuirc, seeing any sign of the dreaded authorities approaching by the road which, like a slender thread between the giant hills, wound away in the distance towards the capital of the Highlands.

A little hope began to gather in my heart.

But they might come on the morrow.

My mother had caught the feverish excitement that reigned in our little household, and from the crooning and croaking of old Mhari, soon learned the doom that hung over us, and it had a most fatal effect upon her frail and delicate constitution. She became dangerously ill; in her face I read that sad and terrible expression which comes but once, and my soul sickened with alarm!

After a late and hasty meal of broiled venison (poached by Callum), and shared with a staghound and the sheep collies, I despatched my fosterer with all speed for the doctor of the district, while I buckled on my dirk, and departed for the new manor-house of Glen Ora, to seek an interview with Sir Horace, and crave for my mother a little delay—that mercy which I disdained to seek for myself.

'The moon is full,' said Callum, as we separated; 'it is a lucky time to undertake anything.'

CHAPTER XVI.
SIR HORACE.

I soon reached the large and handsome modern villa, which crowned the plateau, where the square tower of the Mac Innons had been, for seven hundred years, the landmark of the glens. The hour was eight; but the baronet and his friends were still at the dinner-table, and the brilliance of the wax-lights in the four tall windows of the magnificent dining-room, seemed to straggle with the bright flush of evening that reddened the sky above the darkening mountains of the west.

Through a spacious marble vestibule, adorned by gilded cornices, marble statues, and deer's horns, I was ushered by the plushed and powdered Mr. Jeames Toodles, into an illuminated billiard-room, and here he asked me for my card.

'Card!' reiterated I, reddening, for I had never discovered a use for such a thing before; 'no card is required; say that Allan Mac Innon wishes to speak with Sir Horace, without a moment's delay.'

The valet gave a supercilious smile; but, on perceiving me throw a hasty glance towards a rack of billiard-cues, he made a hasty retreat. After remaining for some time alone, and with no other company than my own bitter and galling reflections, I found the valet before me again; Sir Horace was just finishing dinner, and afterwards had to confer with a gentleman on business.

'And cannot see me?' I exclaimed, making a stride towards the speaker—a gesture which caused him to shuffle backward in terror; my heather-coloured kilt and fierce free mountaineer bearing had in them something new and appalling to him.

Mr. Toodles did not mean to say that exactly; Sir Horace would see me in the course of a few minutes; meantime, would I join Captain Clavering and Mr. Snobleigh, who were lingering over their wine, before ascending to the drawing-room? I bowed, and followed the valet mechanically, with a breast that swelled with many strange emotions. If I committed, in thought, the double sin of covetousness and envy on that occasion, when contrasting the humility, plainness, and penury of my dilapidated home with the splendour and luxury I beheld, it was not for myself, but for the sake of one whom I felt assured would not be long spared to me now; and whom not even the prediction of the Red Priest could protect from the hand of the Spoiler.

From the walnut sideboard the liveried servants were removing the dinner, the rich and overpowering odour of which filled that loftily ceiled, heavily curtained and gorgeous dining-room. To me it seemed a scene from a romance. The vases were richly gilt and mounted with precious stones; the dessert, entree dishes, the soup-tureens, ashets, &c., with which the powdered lacqueys were trotting to and fro, were all of silver exquisitely chased; so were the classic wine-coolers, with the champagne in ice, and the ponderous branches of six wax-lights each. The wassail-bowl of silver had already made its tour; and at a side-table was the coffee simmering, and served in antique china and silver.

But the coffee was neglected, for Clavering, Snobleigh, and two or three other sporting visitors, with Sheriff Mac Fee, were loitering over their wine, fruit, and nuts; and the long polished table was resplendent with tall crystal decanters of the baronet's rare old port, vintage '34, sherry pure as amber, amontillado, first-growth claret, and straw-coloured champagne, foaming in goblet-shaped glasses, while old Hock, Stienberger, Malaga, and Moselle, stood in battalion under the sideboard, or in a cluster under the gigantic epergne.

'Welcome Mac Innon—delighted to see you, old fellow!' exclaimed Clavering, assuming the part of host.

'Aw—aw—how aw you?' added Snobleigh.

'Toodles, a chair for Mr. Mac Innon—wish you had come sooner—Sir Horace would have been happy to have seen you at dinner I am assured—hope you have dined, though? Ah—well, fill your glass—Toodles, champagne here, and pass the claret-jug.'

Sad, anxious, and most unhappy, I was silent, and drained the crystal goblet of champagne. Then my spirit warmed a little, and I joined in the conversation which naturally rose on local subjects, such as deer-stalking, grouse-shooting, and the famous white stag of Loch Ora, which many persons believed to be a myth, as no one could wound or kill it.

Even Mr. Fungus Mac Fee, the sheriff, could speak on these matters; but to me, always rather superciliously, because he knew but too well that my family was fallen and poor; while he always deferred to Mr. Snobleigh, who knew as much about deer-stalking as of squaring the circle, or adjusting the longitude. This sheriff knew intuitively that I hated him.

After toadying to his party, spinning out a subsistence by scribbling in magazines and papers in defence of it; after writing, with the same laudable view, a history of Scotland, in which the clans were handled with such severity, and one might suppose the soul of Cumberland had been in his ink-bottle, Mr. Mac Fee found himself sheriff of a county; and after denouncing on the hustings, and through the medium of a journal (long notorious in Scotland for its anti-nationality, its hatred of the Celtic race, and for being the special utensil of the Government,) the waste of one administration, he had no objection to accept of numerous sinecures for himself and his connections, under their successors; hence, he scraped a sufficient sum to purchase the small estate of Druckendubh. He was naturally coarse, argumentative, and full of vapour and authority; but here, among men of undisputed wealth and position—at least, the position which wealth insures to every blockhead in this conventional age—Fungus Mac Fee was the most bland and suave of mankind.

'Any news to-day, Mr. Mac Innon?' asked the sheriff, raising his impudent eyebrows.

'None, sir,' said I, sharply, for our Scottish placeman knew enough of Highland courtesy to be aware that the prefix was offensive to me.

'Have you not heard that the Russians have crossed the Pruth in two places, and mean to occupy Wallachia and Moldavia?'

'Yes; but I have other things to think of, Mr. Mac Fee, and I wish, in my soul, that they were crossing the Braes of Loch Ora.'

'A deuced odd wish that!' said Captain Clavering, 'but perhaps you don't like that straw-coloured champagne—try the pink.'

'Aw—try the claret-jug—you'll aw—find it rathaw the thing, said the languid Snobleigh, smoothing his bandolined moustache; 'Sir Horace is engaged in the library—aw—just now, with Mr. Snaggs—such a howibble name!—on business. Dem business—wish there was no such thing in the world; Snaggs is always annoying Sir Horace about something or other.'

My heart sank lower on hearing this; for even in this visit to the baronet, fate seemed to have conspired against me; but I should have remembered that naturally Sir Horace was frequently engaged in consultations with Snaggs, for being of a proud and tyrannical disposition, he was ever squabbling about rights and points of etiquette; taking offence where none was intended, and waging a legal—and to Snaggs most profitable—war, with the neighbouring proprietors, farmers, shepherds, and poachers.

'Fine girl that was, whom we met at the gathering the other day,' said the captain.

'Aw—vewy, for a Scots girl—but, aw—a little metaphysical,' responded Snobleigh, sleepily cracking a nut.

'Magnificent hand and arm, though!'

'Aw—rathaw—but she was so dooced pwoud.'

'She will have something handsome, gentlemen,' said Mac Fee, draining a glass of champagne at one vulgar gulp; 'when the people give place to fine fat sheep on her land. She is an heiress, and when six or eight of the small farms are formed into one—and you are pleased with her, captain?'

'f thought her the prettiest of all pretty girls—but flirting with her—pass the claret, thanks—would be mere waste of powder. I must keep my ammunition for better game.'

'Aw—Laura Everingham, I presume,' said Snobleigh, with a little spite in his eye and tone.

The Captain coloured slightly; a shade of annoyance crossed his brow, and regardless that I and others were present, Snobleigh continued to chatter away; and even this exasperated me, for misfortune had rendered me unduly sensitive.

'I assure you, Clavering, that girl Everingham will come in for a jolly good thing or two, when Sir Horace departs to a better world. I—aw—fished it all out of old Snaggs the other night by quoting Blair, and passing the bottle, so I'm a devilish good mind to—'

'What—pop the question, eh?'

'Aw—yes.'

'Then you may save yourself trouble, Snob, my boy, for she has refused me already, and other two of the Household Brigade: but I don't despair yet—for I have the governor's interest.'

'And you proposed—aw—the devil! this was rathaw an extensive proceeding. I thought that I knew how to manage horses and women too. For that, one requires considerable—aw—.'

'What?'

'Study—aw perseverance and care.'

'The ladies are infinitely obliged to you,' said Mac Fee.

'The future Mrs. Snobleigh particularly so,' laughed Clavering; 'Toodles, fill that devil of a claret jug—what the deuce is Sir Horace about?'

'Snaggs and he must have arranged some pretty extensive clearances by this time,' suggested the sheriff, with a furtive glance at me.

'In truth, Clavering,' said Snobleigh, who had been pondering a little; 'I aw—would feel restless with a wife so simple and handsome among the gay fellows of the Household Brigade.'

'Yes—you would be like the husband some one writes about, who,

"While Suspicion robs him of his ease,
Peculiar danger in a red coat sees;
Envies each handsome fellow whom he spies.
And feels his horns at every cornet rise."

Eh—ha ha, ha!'

'Dem husbands—I hate them all.'

'Talking of the Brigade, have you heard of Jernyngham of your battalion lately?'

'He was well cleaned out before he—aw—disappeared from London; but don't know him now, poor devil.'

'It was at this "poor devil's" table you spent some of your happiest hours,' said Clavering, reproachfully. There was a pause, during which I turned towards the door, sick of this empty conversation, and impatient to see the baronet. After the learned Mac Fee had delivered himself for the tenth time of some stereotyped remarks on the heat of the weather, and the excellence of the wine, Mr. Snobleigh observed with his most languid air.

'I am tired of this kind of thing, and must go back to town. Horrid slow here in the 'Ighlands—and—aw—slow fellows all round about. Laura Everingham is chawming, no doubt; and—aw—your sister, Clavering, imparts quite a London air to the whole place; but I—aw—still long for Town. One always saves something, however, in this bawbawous wegion—beg pardon, Mr. Mac Fee, but—aw—aw—'tis so. Had Jernyngham been here, his stud had never been pounded at Tattersall's—his commission at Greenwood's, or his plate by aw—aw—the Lord's chosen people. Now, for instance, in the matter of gloves; in Town, I—aw—I take a walk—and spoil a pair; I take a canter along Rotten Row, or in Hyde Pawk, another pair; dinner, another pair, and for the opera or a ball, another pair, and—aw—aw—so on. And then when one is in debt, as of course everybody is but low scoundrels, the—aw—the saving in many things here is enormous; besides, one aw—acquires the habit of early rising.'

'So the Highlands are not without their advantages?' said I.

'Aw—yes. In London, if not for duty at Kensington or the Tower, I breakfast at one, on coffee and a cigaw; but here I rise at ten appetised like an 'Ighland 'awk—a glass of liqueur—tea, coffee, ham, tongue, game, fowl—aw, aw—dinner ditto; and after knocking about the balls a little, and having a deux temps with Laura, or a game at guinea points, then a devilled bone and champagne—then to bed at two in the morning—at two! aw—think of that Clavering—how Gothic—oh—aw—infernally!'

'Now,' said the sheriff, 'what say you to our proposed little game at écarté?'

'Bravo I—aw must have my revenge on Clavering; he walked into me for aw—one thousand two hundred.'

'So much?' exclaimed Mac Fee, aghast.

'Aw yes.'

'I have his little bill for it, at three months, with a promise to renew,' said Clavering, laughing.

'Then what shall we have to-night?'

'Whist—at crown points.'

'No higher?'

'No—I have a thousand pounds on that devilish horse at the Oaks, and must trot easily.'

'Whist be it, then;' and here they rose to adjourn, leaving me confounded by the ease with which they spoke of sums that to my simple Highland comprehension seemed enormous.

'Toodles—aw order some pink champagne and cigars to the card-room.'

'Cigars if you will,' said Clavering; 'but no champagne; dem it, no—I shall drink no more to-night of anything stronger than Father Adam's pale ale, while playing with you,' and just as they all left the dining-room by one door, I heard the voice of Sir Horace in communication with Snaggs, approaching it by another.

'To-morrow will decide the affair,' said Sir Horace, pausing with his fingers on the crystal door-handle.

'To-morrow or the day after, at latest, my dear sir,' responded the bland voice of Snaggs.

'Of course I am deuced sorry for the old woman, and all that sort of thing—for she must be very unhappy; but we have a great duty to perform—a great duty to society, Mr. Snaggs, and old women must not stand in the way of improvement.'

'To be sure, my dear Sir Horace; "every age," says the divine Blair, will prove burdensome to those who have no fund of happiness in their breast—and as for the young desperado her son, nothing whatever can be made of him.'

'Of course not; his head is filled with such quaint ideas and old Highland stuff, unsuited to modern times, habits, and usages, that he is a mere wild colt, and twice I have been told, pulled out of his stocking,—what do you call it?'

'Skene Dhu, or Black Knife, my dear sir,' suggested Mr. Snaggs.

'Ah yea—a skin doo, upon you, sir. I know not why these Highland fellows are allowed to bristle about with their daggers and skenes, when there are laws passed against the wearing of arms. But the truth is, the sooner that this young fellow and his people are sent off to America by the Sutherland, under Captain Sellars, the better. There are some fine swamps to drain, moors to cultivate, and woods to cut down in the Cunadas; and as for that great ruffian Cullum Dhu, who nearly murdered poor Toodles the other day—dem the fellow, I'll have him transported! Adversity teaches these fierce spirits no lesson.'

'True, my dear Sir Horace,' chimed in the moralist; '"adversity," exclaims the divine Blair, "how blunt are all the arrows of thy quiver, compared with those of guilt!"'

'Dem Blair—I am quite sick of him, too; but let us have a glass of Moselle, and then we'll join the ladies in the drawing-room. You here, Mr. Mac Innon!' he exclaimed, with angry surprise on seeing me; 'how do ye do, sir,' he added, with a dark countenance; 'my friend Mr. Snaggs and I have just closed a long conversation about you.'

'I am sorry to hear it, Sir Horace, for now I fear my visit here is bootless.'

'You judge most correctly, if you have come to ask delay about my projected clearances.'

There was a glare in the sharp eye, and a smile on the thin lips of Snaggs, as Sir Horace said this. I felt my eyes flash fire as anger gathered in my heart; for heaven never intended me either for a temporiser or a diplomatist.

'I was about to speak to you, Sir Horace, not of myself, but of my mother, who is aged, sickly, infirm, and unable to comprehend how any power on earth possesses a law to expel her from Glen Ora.'

'Now, young man, you irritate me! This is the rock upon which all you Celts split your very obtuse heads. The good lady, your mother, with the rest of the people on that portion of my estate, must learn that the tenant has no right in the soil.'

'None whatever, legally or morally,' added Snaggs.

'Your property!' I replied, trembling with passion; 'it would have been as much as your head is worth to have said this to a Mac Innon on the spot where you stand, a hundred years—ay fifty years ago. But it is of my mother I would speak—'

'Nay, sir—excuse me—I will hear nothing; moreover, your presence here is an unwarrantable intrusion; the ladies, Mr. Snaggs, await us at coffee.'

'Oh for a curse upon him whose mad extravagance and folly brought my father's son to this humiliation!'

CHAPTER XVII.
MR. SNOBLEIGH.

From the illuminated marble vestibule, I plunged out into the darkness of the night, and goaded by my fierce and terrible thoughts, was rushing down the avenue, when in my confusion I stumbled against a marble Psyche, that stood in the centre of the carriage-way, about a pistol-shot from the door, and fell, stunned and almost breathless beside the pedestal.

I thought of my feeble mother about to be torn from the roof that had sheltered her so long; I thought of my brave father now beneath the sod, and of his fathers in that old ancestral burial-place, where 'shaded by sepulchral yew,' lay the warriors and the patriarchs of our tribe, and where I would never lie; I thought of all that had been, but could never be again; the stirring past, with all its shadowy glory; the humiliating present with all its bitterness; the dark and dubious future with all its doubts and fears; and a storm—a devouring fever—raged within me!

Placing my hands upon my temples, I pressed my hot and throbbing brow upon the cold marble pedestal, and endeavoured to reflect and to breathe.

The three windows of the drawing-room, which in the French fashion, were constructed to open down to the Portsoy marble steps that descended to the lawn, were all unclosed, as the heat of the atmosphere was great, and the luxury, lights, and music within made me scan for a moment this magnificent apartment from the place where I lingered. It was crowded by objects of virtû, and the subdued lights of the crystal chandeliers, and chaste girondoles, fell on antique Sevrès and China vases; on oriental jars and Dresden china plateaux; on the Warwick vase in verde antique; on velvet hangings draperied up with gold; on Dianas and Apollos, &c.; on Rosso de Lavanti marble pillars; on bronzes and Medician vases, glittering antique buhl and or-molu tables, and all that might please the eye, or gratify the whim of a moment.

The notes of a piano—one of Errard's best—and the voice of a female singing, came towards me, and I raised myself from the ground on my elbow to listen. My heart beat wildly. The air was soft and sad and touching; and—though then unknown to me—it was the divine Spirito Gentil from the opera of Donizetti. She who sang was Laura, and my ears drank in every gentle note; the fierce conflict of pride and passion died away within me; my heart was melted by the gentler emotions that Laura's influence roused, and I could have wept—but not a tear would come.

I could see her figure, with Clavering standing beside her, patting time with his gloved hand, and turning over the leaves of the address to Leonora. I wished him any place but there.

Laura looked charming!

From the crystal girandoles that stood on the little carved brackets of the piano, the light fell in bright rays over her black silk dress, which, in its darkness, contrasted strongly with the pure whiteness of her beautiful neck and delicate hands. Her face was full of sweetness and animation, and her soft voice so delightfully modulated, was full of an enthusiasm that lent her usually pale cheek a flush, as she sang that winning Italian air with all its requisite pathos.

'Aw—vewy well—she does sing diwinely!' said a voice near me. 'Alboni—even little Piccolomini herself, could not surpass her.'

'Hush—pray,' said another.

'Aw—now it is ended—bravo!'

Close by me were Mr. Mac Fee the sheriff, and Mr. Snobleigh, smoking each a choice cuba, and hovering so near the marble Psyche, that I dared not move, lest I should be observed and suspected of eaves-dropping.

'A dooced bad cigaw,' said Snobleigh, endeavouring to light a refractory cabana, and swaying about in a manner that sufficiently indicated how the fumes of the champagne had mounted into that vacuum where his brains should have been; 'dem—I think your 'Ighland air spoils them; and aw—aw—you admire Laura—eh; aw—now it draws; a fine girl—say yes—why the devil don't you say yes?'

'Beautiful—and you are tender in that quarter?' simpered the servile Mac Fee.

'Aw—yes, and have some devilish serious thoughts of matrimony, too.'

'Marriage is a serious thing, Mr. Snobleigh.'

'Aw—yes—demmed serious when one marries age, ugliness, or aw—poverty; but with, with a charming young person like Miss Everingham—it alters the case entirely. But don't you observe, old fellow, that Laura talks too much of that aw—aw—peculiar individual—that species of outlaw, as Mr. Snaggs names him—'

'Young Mac Innon?'

'Dem! yes—but to teaze me of course. What is that now? Fanny Clavering at her aw—aw—everlasting song—

"I dare not seek to offer thee
A timid love like mine—"

'Like hers indeed—aw—aw—ha! ha! it has been offered to half the fellows in the Household Brigade. Curse that pink champagne—it makes one so devilish shaky in the aw—legs. Yes—Laura has talked so much about this 'Ighland colt, Mac Innon, ever since the shooting-match, that I—aw don't half like it. In fact, Clavering—a good judge of both horses and aw—women—swears that she loves him.'

'You cannot be serious?'

'Aw—yes, frightfully serious. But only think of a girl like Laura troubling her—aw head about such a wild Highland Sawney Bean? I should like to see him handling my yacht, the Bruiser, in a stiff nor'-easter off Cowes; taking the mettle out of a four-in-hand team; aw—making up his book on the Derby; widing the winnaw at the Oaks; knocking the balls about at billiards, or aw—aw—getting a child of Judah to fork out the tip, or achieving anything else that savours of town life, or of civilization. The chawming Laura in love with him indeed; 'pon my soul the idea is—aw too absawd!'

'Absurd, indeed,' chorused Mr. Mac Fee.

'Absawd—my dear fellow, absawd!' added Snobleigh, as he staggered away, followed by the obsequious Mac Fee.

Laura spoke of me frequently, and Clavering thought she loved me!

Loved me—could it be credible, or was it the mere jest of a heedless heart, that linked our names together—a linking that, in love, has a nameless charm to the young, the timid, the tender, and the true. What a tumult was raised in my breast by this casual revelation! I scarcely dared to breathe. If aught was wanting to increase the bitterness of the struggle waged by pride and love within me, it was the words of the thoughtless Snobleigh.

But these bright hopes of a vague and joyous future—and all their train of burning thoughts and ardent aspirations, were doomed to be crushed and forgotten for a time, by the terrible tidings awaiting me at my desolate home.

Midnight was close at hand, when, turning away from this abode of luxury and splendour, where every comfort that wealth can procure surrounded the cold and selfish Sir Horace and his pampered household, I bent my steps towards the mountains, and by a narrow path through a dark and moonless copsewood—or rather, an old primeval forest of the Middle Ages, I hastened towards Glen Ora.

I had much to reflect on, and above all the flood of bitter and anxious thoughts that rolled like a dark and tempestuous sea around me, I saw the image of Laura Everingham; for, boy like, and full of mountain poetry, legendary lore, and old enthusiasm, to me she naturally became a goddess, and the guiding-star of all my hopes and aspirations; while serving to temper with something of reason the fiery anger with which I was tempted to regard the cruelty and harshness of her father; who, like too many of our new Highland proprietors, was but the slave of mammon and the tool of a cunning factor.

While threading my way—somewhat hastily I confess—through a deep and savage cairn, which was terrible of old as the shade of a mysterious spirit—a rushing sound, a crashing of branches struck my ear, and something white passed near me, like a sunbeam, or a flash of fire.

'The white stag!' I exclaimed, in a breathless voice, and involuntarily grasped my dirk, while the perspiration started to my brow; for by an old tradition in the glen, it was affirmed, that whenever danger was near the race of Mac Innon, a white stag crossed the Braes of Loch Ora.

'My mother! my mother!' was my next thought, and like a mountain deer, I sprang away to reach the old jointure-house of our family.

CHAPTER XVIII.
DEATH.

Dawn was stealing across the dun slopes of Ben Ora and the grey rocky scalps of the Craig-na-tuirc, when I reached the crest of a hill which overhung my mother's residence; and there I paused to draw breath, and to survey a scene which, though familiar to me as the features of my own face, never lost the charm of its lonely beauty.

Diminished by distance, the little thatched cottages in the glen seemed less than molehills, but green and silent, dotting the slope far down below, while above them rose the stupendous mountains piled up, crest on crest, to heaven. From the humble roofs, the smoke was beginning to ascend in long spiral columns into the clear and ambient air, as the poor, but thrifty housewives of the glen prepared their fires of guisse-monaye—the bogwood and black peat.

In this vast Highland solitude where I paused the breeze bore to the ear no sound of domestic life; no sheep bleated, as of old, on the green hill side; no horse neighed or cow lowed in the ample glen beneath, for the poor cottagers had long since parted with all for sustenance; but there rang the ceaseless rush of the torrent, which plashed and glittered as it tore through the corrie; the whirr of the plover, the hum of the heather-bee, or the distant roar of the rutting hind, as he rose from his dewy lair among the feathery bracken beside yonder old grey battle-cairn. Even these sounds were faint or undefined, and all nature seemed as motionless and still, as the stately stag with giant horns, that stood on a pinnacle of rock, against the rosy flush of the eastern sky. He seemed to be surveying the scene; then he moved his lofty antlers, and lo! between me and the gorgeous blaze of light that overspread the east, and threw out in black relief the sharp jagged outline of the rocky hill, there rose a forest of branching antlers, as, in obedience to their king, a noble herd of deer, calves, hinds, and harts, three thousand head and more, stood for a minute as if to show their whole array, and then with slow and measured steps, descended and wound down the mountain side, until they disappeared among the sandy ravines and bushy corries which the streams and storms of ages have torn and riven in the bosom of Ben Ora.

There had been a great stalking expedition in the forests of the West, and the gillies of the Marquis of Drumalbane had been driving the deer for many miles along the shore; hence the collection of this vast herd, but amidst its masses I could discern no trace of a white stag. Then, whence the vision of last night? Was this animal indeed supernatural, and the harbinger of evil, as tradition affirmed it to be?

My gloomy forebodings increased as the brilliance of morning descended from the mountain slopes into the deep and dreamy glens, and as I hastened down the narrow path which led to my mother's house. No smoke was wreathing upward from its chimneys, and there was an aspect of still life about it which surprised and alarmed me. The door was wide open—an unusual circumstance. Anon, I saw a number of persons hastening to and fro between the cottages of the glen, and a little crowd of men and women gradually collected round the house. A deadly terror smote my heart, and every pulse stood still. Then my ears tingled, as a cry of lamentation woke the silent echoes of the valley. I sprang down the mountain side, rushed through the startled clachan, and at the door of the house met old Mhari, her eyes red with weeping. She threw her arms round me.

'My mother?' I exclaimed.

'She is dying!' replied the sobbing woman, in her own figurative language; 'she must soon be laid in the Place of Sleep, with her feet to the rising sun.'

'Dying!' I ejaculated.

'Why protract the poor lad's misery?' said a gentleman, who wore a suit of accurate black, with a white neckcloth, and silver spectacles, and whom I knew to be the doctor of the district, and a great enemy of old Mhari, for whose universal specific for all complaints (wild garlic boiled with May butter) he had a great contempt; 'why add to what he must suffer?—tell him at once, that he may bear his loss like a Christian and a man. Mac Innon, your mother is dead—God help you, my poor fellow!'

It was so—dead—and now I had not a relation, not a friend in the world, but the poor people of the glen, to whom I was bound by the common ties of clanship and descent. On learning that I had gone to visit Sir Horace, and knowing well my fiery temper and proud disposition, my mother's gentle breast had been filled by a hundred tender anxieties and thoughts of danger. Finding herself alone for a little space, animated by what purpose heaven only knows—perhaps by a restless desire to breathe the fresh air of the glen for the last time; perhaps to look for me, or perhaps to test the worth of the old tradition, and so rid herself of a life that had become a burden; inspired by some mysterious impulse, and endued thereby with more than her wonted strength of thought and purpose, she had robed herself in a plaid and wrapper, and left her bed unseen, for she was found dead—dead on the rustic seat beside the porch, and consequently beyond the walls of the jointure-house. Here she was found by Callum Dhu, on his returning with our doctor, a dapper little country practitioner, whose attempts to restore animation proved utterly unavailing.

'Dhia! Dhia!' was the exclamation of Callum; 'assuredly the curse of the Red Priest is here!'

'Curse of—what do you say, my good man?' asked the doctor, with a cross air of perplexity; 'it is the result of an inward complaint under which she long laboured. She was highly susceptible—nervous—sickly and sensitive—I was always quite prepared for this fatal termination.'

'But you never said so till now,' retorted Callum; 'so what avails your skill. Had she only kept within the door she might have lived long enough.'

I now felt myself above the reach of further misfortune. I had been the mark of Fate's sharpest arrows, and a proud but fierce emotion of defiance swelled within me for a time. Even Snaggs and the coming terrors of the eviction were forgotten now. Thus I felt buoyed up, as it were, by a courage gathered from the very depth of my despair; but anon, the sense of loneliness that fell upon me was crushing and profound.

She who for years had watched over me, as only a mother watches over the last of her little brood; she who in age I had tended, nursed, and consoled, with a love, like her own, the most unselfish and unwearied, had died at last, when I was absent, and when none was near to close her eyes—to kiss her pallid lip.

'It is a warning!' exclaimed her old nurse Mhari. 'The men of Glentuirc are gone—those of Glen Ora must soon follow. Surd air Suinard! chaidh Ardnamorchuan a doluidh!'[*]

[*] "Prepare Sainard, for Ardnamorchuan is gone to wreck!" a proverb.

Then came the funeral—all, all a dream to me.

The night had been dark and stormy, and in Glen Ora the keening of the women, and the howling of the dogs, 'who knew that death was nigh,' mingled with the wail of the bagpipe and the soughing of the wind; and, like a dream, I see before me still the apartment hung with white, and all its furniture shrouded in the same cold, dreary, livery; the coffin lid bearing a vessel which contained a little salt, and all the doors left wide open, to give free passage to the departing spirit, which old superstition still averred was hovering near its earthly tenement; the low-moaned songs, or the deep and earnest lamentations of Mhari, Minnie, and other women of the glen; the cold, stiff, and conventional prayer by the parish minister; the wine and whisky, cake and cheese served round before 'the lifting,' and the slow, solemn march of Gil Chroisd (the servant of Christ), which Ewen Oig and Gillespie Ruadh wailed forth on their great mountain-pipes, as they headed the funeral procession, which departed about sunrise for the burial-place of our tribe.

The morning dawned on murky clouds of red and amber hue, piled in masses above Ben Ora, around whose rocky crest the ascending mist was wreathed like a mighty cymar. The sun arose, but gloomy, pale, and watery; and, to me, all nature seemed to wear the livery of gloom and woe.

The day was as dreary as our errand was mournful, and slowly the procession, which was formed by the whole male population of the glen, in number about a hundred men and boys, the aged supporting themselves on their staffs, and leading their grandchildren by the hand, wound over the hills, communing together on the virtues of the deceased, and of that olden time, to which a falling people ever look fondly back, as a faded woman to the days of her beauty—as the aged to the days of their youth.

All the funeral arrangements were conducted in the modern, rather than the ancient, Highland fashion. Old Sergeant Ian Mac Raonuil, who had served with my father in the Black Watch, had the charge of marshalling the procession, and at certain distances on the road he regularly cried 'halt-relief,' when four fresh men hastened forward to bear the coffin, which was carried for four miles on the shoulders of our people, until we reached the place of interment, on the shore of a great salt loch, or arm of the sea.

The day was still lowering; the sounding sea of the stormy Hebrides dashed its waves on the echoing beach; the eternal mist, like a mighty shroud, rolled along the drenched hills and dripping heather; and through it, as through a veil, the joyless sun, shorn of his rays, seemed at times to hang in mid air, like an obscured lamp. Our hearts were heavy indeed. Even the Lowland Scots are peculiarly liable to be impressed by the appearance of nature at all times; then, at such a time of sorrow and foreboding, how much more so were we, who were bred among the stupendous scenery of the North, and by our race and habits were the creatures of strong and gloomy imaginations! And then the slow, sad, and wailing march of Gil Chroisd; how mournfully it rang between the silent mountains, and woke the echoes of that lonely shore, where the long-legged heron, or the gigantic sea-horse, were brooding on the slippery rocks, and where the wiry Scottish pines cast their shadow on the breakers!

At a place named Coil-chro, or the Wood-of-hazel-nuts, a turn of the path, as it wound over the headland, brought us in view of a gentleman and two ladies on horseback, attended by a smart mounted servant, clad in a grey surtout, and accoutred with a leather girdle, laced hat, and black cockade. The gentleman dismounted, and with much politeness and good feeling, in imitation of the local custom, remained on foot with head uncovered while the procession passed by. At a glance I recognized Captain Clavering in this polite stranger, and under the broad hats of the ladies the soft features of his bright-eyed sister and the gentle Miss Everingham. It was at this moment that old Mac Raonuil cried 'halt-relief!' and while a change took place in the bearers, Laura, whose eyes were full of tears, brought her horse close to me, and holding out her gloved hand, pressed and patted mine with great frankness and kindly sympathy.

'Heaven help you, poor Mr. Mac Innon,' she said; 'we all deplore your bereavement, and feel only remorse and shame for the severity with which my angry papa——but what can I do?'

I kissed her hand, and she did not withdraw it; while the beautiful expression that filled her eyes, to which her half-drooping lids lent a wonderful sweetness, made my heart swell with tenderness and gratitude; for human sympathy was doubly valuable, and hers was doubly dear to me at a time so terrible; but again the shrill notes of the wild pipe struck up—again the solemn procession went forward, and a turn of the road hid Laura from my view—yet her eyes seemed before me still, and her voice was lingering in my car.

A half mile further on brought us to the ancient burial-ground; it was circular and surrounded by a low ruined wall of rough dry stones, as it had once been a Druidical circle. Here the grass grew with peculiar richness and rankness, for the dead of more than two thousand years lay there. Old stones, graven with quaint runes, lay half sunk, amid the moss and nettles, like the Celtic cross that marked where the Christianized Scot had laid his dust in the same grave with his pagan fathers, who had worshipped the God of Day and the Spirit of Loda. Close by stood an old chapel of the Kuldei, dedicated to St. Colme, the Abbot of Iona. It had been a ruin since the Spaniards, under the loyal and noble Marquis of Tullibardine, had landed in Glensheil, and fought the Government troops early in the last century; but a vaulted corner of this venerable fane was still used as a chapel by the poor Catholic Gael of the district. Here a rough deal table served them for an altar; a rough crucifix, and six candles, in clay holders, stood thereon, with a few garlands of freshly-gathered wild flowers, while heather was spread before it for those who chose to kneel. Near it was a miserable hut, or wigwam, where Father Raoul Beg Mac Donuil (i.e., Little Father Ronald, the son of Donald), a priest from the Scottish College at Valladolid, dwelt in prayer, penury, and misery; for among the poor clansmen of the impoverished and almost desolate West, the labours of the Catholic clergy are indeed the labour of love and self-denial.

Three Mac Innons had been Abbots of Iona, and one of them built this chapel. In ancient times, when one of the house of Glen Ora died, a grave was found in the morning ready dug; but by whose hands no mortal knew—for none had ever dared to watch so said old tradition; but even this mysterious sexton had left the country, unable perhaps, as Callum Dhu affirmed, to breathe the air that was infected by factors, gangers, and rural police.

Before entering the burying-ground we performed the deasuil, and went round it with the sun. The people insisted on this, and I had no wish or will but theirs; besides, the Celt is a great stickler for ancient customs. The parish minister permitted Father Raoul to say a prayer at the grave, for she who was gone had ever been kind to him, as a priest of that faith in which her forefathers had lived and died; and it is a noble feature in the Highland character, that neither priestcraft, rancour, nor bigotry could ever warp or sever the kindly ties of blood and clanship.

The Place of Sleep, or, as some still named it as in the Druid days, The Place of the Stones, was one of those old yew-shaded graveyards which still remain in many a desolate glen, to mark where our expatriated people were wont to lay their dead. Here we lowered her into the narrow house.

A little shovelling, a little batting of sods, every stroke on which went home to my aching heart, an uncovering of heads—a little time, and all was over. I felt more than ever alone in the world—for a recollection was all that remained to me of my mother—my last relative on this side of that remorseless grave.

The minister patted me on the shoulder—the old priest shook me kindly by the hand, and led me away. In vain did they tell me, in hackneyed phrase, that those whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth; my rebellious spirit spurned the stereotyped idea. I felt myself a beggar and a lonely outcast—that all was over now, that every human tie which bound me to my home (but had I now a home?) was torn asunder for ever!

Omens of evil, such as serve to feed the superstitious mind, and to make a deep impression on a people so filled with poetry and wild fancies as our unlettered Gael, had not been wanting, as forerunners of these calamities; and these omens had been duly remarked by the aged dwellers in our glen, as the sure forerunners of direful events.

In the preceding winter, when the country was covered by snow, Gillespie Ruadh and others averred, that early one morning they discovered marks of the feet or talons of a gigantic bird, each impression being at least twenty yards apart. These tremendous footmarks were traced across the glen, and over Ben Ora, from the loch to the sea shore, where all trace of them was lost in the flowing tide. On hearing of this marvel, I hurried to the spot, but a fresh fall of snow had obliterated these strange marks, which were declared to indicate a departure of our people towards the western sea.

Moreover of late, the white stag had been frequently seen, and had even ventured to approach the lights in our cottage windows.

This animal, which the most expert of our foresters had failed to slay, was a tall, powerful, and gigantic stag, with antlers of remarkable size and beauty—royal antlers—i.e. having three points on each horn. These proud appendages it never cast; at least none had ever been found. According to the unvarying story of the hunters, stalkers, and keepers, it was known to have been in existence for more than two hundred and fifty years; for Lachlan Mohr's father, Torquil Mac Innon, who was slain by an arrow at the battle of Benrinnes (excuse this antiquarianism, good reader, but your Welshmen, Celts and Irishmen, are full of such old memories), wounded it in the right ear, the half of which he shot away. Thereafter a fleet and fierce, but stately white stag, minus an ear, had roved, and was now affirmed to be roving, in the woods of Glen Ora.

If this was indeed the same that Torquil covered with his long Spanish arquebus, it must have rivalled those of Juvenal, or the hawks of Ælian, which lived for seven hundred years. Be this as it may, if on the shores of Lochtreig there was a white stag which never died, why should there not be another on the shores of Loch Ora? this was deemed unanswerable.

The swift white stag which now haunted the woods of the Mac Innons was certainly (as I had often seen by my telescope) minus the ear which tradition alleged old Torquil shot away; and this miraculous animal was affirmed to be the same which had passed the tent of Lachlan in the night before he was slain at Worcester, and which appeared before the calamities of Culloden. It had been visible often of late, and the poor unlettered Gael of the glen spoke of it in whispers one to another as a certain warning of the total ruin about to overtake them.

CHAPTER XIX.
THE EVICTION.

Whispering of these things, the men of the glen recrossed the mountains, but slowly and silently, for the voice of the pipe was heard no more on the gloomy heath; the boom of the climbing waves had died away on the distant beach, and evening was reddening the dun heathy slopes of the Ben when we drew near our home, and a cry of alarm burst from those who were in front of our funeral party. Large columns of smoke were seen to ascend from the hollow, and to curl in the clear air between us and the sky.

A chill came over the hearts of those who accompanied me. As for myself, I deemed, as I have said, that misfortune had shot the sharpest shafts at me, and now that I had nothing more in this world to care for, or to fear; but yet I felt a sore pang, when, on arriving at a gorge of the hills, rightly named Gar-choine, or The Place of Lamentation, for there the Campbells had once defeated the Mac Innons, we came in sight of the beautiful natural amphitheatre of Glen Ora, and saw thirty columns of smoke ascending from as many cottages, and uniting in one broad and heavy cloud of vapour, that rolled like mist along the mountain sides. On the slope of the hill were clustered a crowd of women and children, screaming and lamenting, while at the far extremity of the glen, where the narrow and winding road that led to Inverness dipped down towards the Caledonian Canal, we perceived a train of carts laden with furniture—the miserable household gear of our poor cotters; while the bayonets of a party of soldiers who escorted it—like a Spanish treasure or a Roman triumph—flashed a farewell ray in the setting sun, for resistance had been anticipated by Mr. Ephraim Snaggs; and thus he had borrowed an unwilling party from the detachment which usually garrisons the secluded barrack at Fort William.

The glensmen paused on the brow of the hill which overlooked their desecrated homes, and their voices rose with their clenched hands in one heavy and terrible imprecation; then with a shout they rushed down towards their wives and little ones, where a fresh scene of grief and sorrow awaited them; for now we were homeless, and 'landless, landless,' as ever were the race of Alpine in the last century.

Snaggs and the Sheriff had taken their measures well to evict the people, destroy their dwellings, and seize the furniture when no resistance could be offered; by choosing a time when all the men of the glen were absent at my mother's interment. Yet they took nearly as many precautions before venturing up the side of the Loch Ora, as if the clans were still in their most palmy days, when Lachlan Mohr feasted his brave men on the best beeves of the Campbells, and had five hundred targets, and as many claymores, hung in his hall.

The barbarous cruelties exercised by a neighbouring Duchess and a canting Marquis upon the poor, had so greatly exasperated the Mac Innons, that at fairs and elsewhere, they had been in the habit of openly threatening an armed resistance to any attempt to evict them from the glen, where they—the aboriginal race—had dwelt for ages before Laird or Peer or feudal parchments had a name in the land. Callum's character and mine were well known to be reckless, bold, and even desperate; thus Messieurs Snaggs and Mac Fee took their measures wisely, and accordingly selected the time for attack, when the whole of the male population were at the grave of the Mac Innons.

The rural police of the adjacent districts were secretly ordered to hold tryst in a wood about six miles distant. There they arrived about midnight, and received a harangue from Sheriff Mac Fee on the majesty of the law; there an oath was administered to them, and there Mr. Snaggs quoted Blair, and gave them that which proved much more acceptable—a jorum of whisky and ale. On mustering their forces, these worthy officials found that, including themselves, the Procurator Fiscal and a couple of clerks, with the police, they had only thirty men, but as well armed with hatchets, crow-bars, levers and pickaxes, as if they were about to invest the Redan. Doubtful still of success, application had been made to the Commandant at Fort William for a Serjeant's party of twelve men from the Irish Fusileers, with twenty rounds of ball-cartridge each, as there was a fear that the same rifles which had done such wonders at the recent Gathering, might cover the legal person of the great moralist. Thus the whole possé marched in array of battle into the glen, where, to the terror and dismay of the women, they appeared about half an hour after the last of the funeral procession had disappeared over the summit of the hill.

An immediate and indiscriminate attack was made upon the cottages and on the old jointure-house; and amid the shrieks, outcries, tears and lamentations of the women, the usual work of eviction and destruction progressed with as much spirit as if Huske, Hawley, Cumberland and Co., had left the infernal shades to visit upper air. Delay and mercy were craved alike in vain by these poor people. In vain did more than one young mother hold her new-born babe aloft; in vain did the daughters of those who fought with Moore and Wellington, implore pity, on bended knees, with clasped hands and streaming eyes, as they clung about the knees of Snaggs and Mac Fee; but each was "sullen as Ajax," and bent on upholding the dignity of the law and of wealth. The inmates were summoned to come forth, and if they refused, were roughly dragged out, some with babes at their breasts, and batoned with such brutality, that the Irish Fusileers, whose hearts revolted at the police, and who in their own land had seen too much of similar work, used the butts of their muskets against the limbs of the law, and thus offered some protection to our women.

Every article of furniture was flung out; box-beds were torn down; chairs, tables, kail-pots, and kettles, spinning-wheels, caups, quaighs and luggies, clothing and delft, were thrown on the sward, and in many instances destroyed in a spirit of sheer recklessness. Every little object which time, tenderness, or association made valuable in the humble eyes of the cottagers was demolished or carried off. The domestic shrine was rifled; its lares desecrated—its household gods destroyed. Everything eatable or drinkable was at once appropriated by the plunderers. The thatch was torn down; crow-bars and levers were applied to the huge boulder-stones, which in many instances formed the corners of the poor huts, and by one or two wrenches, the whole fabric was tumbled in a heap of ruin. The cabers and couples were cut through by saws or axes; and thus every hut, house, barn, stable, and hen-roost were destroyed. The old jointure-house was gutted of its furniture, every vestige of which was piled on carts with the miserable chattels of the people, and driven off towards the nearest market-town; not an article of my property escaped, save a few old seals and rings, which, with my father's sword, old Mhari and Minnie concealed about their persons. Then the mansion was unroofed; the doors hewn down; the windows dashed out; and the floors torn up and burned, to render it totally uninhabitable. Thus from house to house, from cot to cot, and from barn to byre, went these ministers of destruction; the sick were dragged from their beds; the aged mother of Alisdair Mac Gouran, a woman in her ninetieth year, and whose grey head had not left her pillow for three years, was borne out and flung on the damp hill side. Women scarcely recovered from the pains of maternity—and others on the point of becoming mothers, were alike brought forth, and those who resisted, or vainly attempted to save some prized article, though of little value, were beaten with batons until forced to relinquish their hold.

Seated by her fire, Widow Gillian (the relict of a soldier whose patronymic was Ca-Dearg), and who was the mother of three sons in our Highland Division, boldly refused to come forth, or to yield up her husband's silver medals, of which they endeavoured to deprive her. Rendered desperate and frantic, this woman, though aged, seemed stout and active; she clung, shrieking, to the posts of her bed; but the police tore her away. Then she caught wildly at the jambs of a door; but her fingers were soon bruised or broken by batons, and one constable tired of her screaming, dealt her a blow which fractured her skull, and covered her long grey hair with blood. Then she became insensible. Flora, her daughter, one of the prettiest girls in the glen, when seeking to defend her, received a kick in the breast, from which she never recovered.

Fire was now applied to all the remaining cottages, and their roofs of thatch, turf, and heather, with their old dry rafters of resinous mountain pine, burned bravely. The work of destruction was nearly complete.

Then the sheriff mounted his horse; Snaggs bestrode his trotting garron; the carts laden with such furniture as had not been burned, broken, or deemed worthless, were put in motion; the few sheep and cattle of the people were collected, and accompanied by the constables who were laden with everything they could lay hands upon, and surrounded by the pitying soldiers with their bayonets fixed, Messrs. Fungus Mac Fee, Ephraim Snaggs, and the Fiscal, headed the plunder of the glen, and departed, leaving that once beautiful little mountain-village a heap of smoking ruins—every hut levelled flat, or sinking amid smoke, flame, and dust—the jointure-house reduced to four bare walls; while the women and their little ones, bathed in tears, or covered with cuts, blood, and bruises, remained in a stupor of silent astonishment and horror at this irreparable destruction, which divested them of shelter, of food, furniture, clothing, and everything, and just when the rain-charged clouds of night were descending on the hills.

Let not the English reader deem this atrocious scene overdrawn. In Sutherland, Inverness, and Ross, in Moidart and the Isles, such have been enacted with even greater brutality since the beginning of this century. Yet the brave, hardy, frugal and patient Highlanders have endured it without complaint. In form of law, murders have been committed in open day—but then it was merely the manslaughter of a few Highland paupers, to enforce the dignity of ducal wealth and the majesty of feudal law.

'Thus it is,' says the brave old General Stewart, 'that the love of speculating in the brute creation, has invaded these mountains, into which no foreign enemy could ever penetrate, and has expelled a brave people whom no invader could ever subdue. It has converted whole glens and districts, once the abode of a bold, vigorous, and independent race of men, into scenes of desolation.'

CHAPTER XX.
DESOLATION.

Night came down on that scene of lamentation and woe—on more than eighty human beings who were fashioned in the image of God, and were yet denied such shelter as He accords to the fox and eagle; but though their hearths were desolate, and their old hereditary but humble homes demolished, the clearance could not be deemed complete, until the people were entirely swept away from the country.

Callum and I obtained shelter with the old priest Father Raoul, who afforded us a corner of his little hut; the poor man had but one pallet—and there we remained for a day or two, considering what steps should be taken to find food for those who were starving in the now desolate glen, and moreover to provide for ourselves.

Thus I found a temporary home, within a few feet of the spot, where she, to whom I had ever turned for consolation and comfort, advice and sympathy, was taking her eternal rest.

Meanwhile fresh cruelties and scenes of horror took place in that ill-fated glen, where the people were completely given up to the malevolent fury of Snaggs, who, as a man of the law, had a truly legal aversion to Highlanders.

The evicted formed a little bivouac on the heather. In one place lay a sick mother, stretched on a pallet, covered by her husband's plaid; around her nestled her little ones, gazing with awe and terror at this unusual scene; on the deathlike visage of one parent and the stern despair that lurked in the eyes of the other. Fires of turf and rafters were kindled, and round these, in little booths of rugs and plaids, nestled the younger children, and infants in cradles. Amid these the elder children sported and played, ignorant of the ruin that had come upon them, and in their heedless glee forming a strong contrast to their grief-stricken parents, whose once high spirit was crushed and broken now. Such is the effect of tyranny, starvation, and misrule!

The old soldier, Ian Mac Raonuil, burrowed a hole on the brow of a hill under a rock, and spread his plaid over it. Herein lay his wife, nursing a sickly and delicate child, while he with his stouter sons slept on the sward. The air became chilly, and the cloudy sky was overcharged with dew; thus many who were sick and ailing, wandered about like ghosts on the midnight hill, unable to find either shelter or repose. Premature labour came on the wife of Gillespie Ruadh; and there, on the bleak side of Ben Ora, the wretched Highland mother brought her child into the world. Before morning she expired, and the aged widow Mac Gouran lay also a corpse, not far from her; for before dawn, there came on a tempest of lightning, wind, and rain, as if the very elements had conspired with the petty tyrants of the glen, to destroy the homeless Mac Innons. And while the blue lightning gleamed between the bare scalp of Ben Ora and the rifted brow of the Craig-na-tuirc; while the rain like a ceaseless torrent smoked along the soaking heather, and flooded every rocky chasm and sandy runnel; while the wind swept over the hills as if it would have torn up the heath by the roots, our poor people all nestled together, and, lifting up their voices, sang a psalm with touching piety. Amid this tempest the mother and her youngling died; and the beautiful Celtic superstition—that a woman who dies in childbed, whatever her offences in life—is borne by angels straight to heaven, was remembered now, as the people whispered it to one another, and drew comfort from it.

The sufferings of the night left them more wretched than ever.

To shelter the women, and to veil the dead bodies from the view of the children, a few cabers were propped together, and above these the men spread their plaids and grey frieze coats; but ere long there was a cry of alarm, and the infamous Snaggs, with a party of his levellers and armed constables, came upon them again. Then the coverings were torn off; the cabers flung aside, and the sick and the dead were remorselessly exposed to the blaze of the hot morning sun. The booth which sheltered the children was demolished, and the wife of Mac Raonuil was dragged from her hole on the hill-side.

In vain did she weep and hold up her babe; in vain did the sick veteran, her husband, point to his wounded arm, his silver hairs, and three war-medals; the only reply was fierce abuse for daring to seek shelter, or to burrow, after a notice of removal had been duly served upon them.

A few ducks and hens, which had been wandering and scraping among the ruins of the cottages, were now collected and carried off by the constables, lest they might afford a day's food to the homeless, who were threatened with fresh vengeance by those jacks-in-office, if found in the glen to-morrow. Mr. Snaggs, who always spoke blandly, quoted Scripture and Blair on the folly of resistance; the beauty of submission to the will of God, and more especially of the new proprietor, for 'go they must—a ship was coming round to Loch Ora with sheep; and on the morrow there would arrive several hampers of a new species of game with which Sir Horace meant to stock the glen. Go then, my dear friends,' continued Mr. Snaggs, with a gloating eye at Minnie, who was kneeling over some sick children; 'go, and the Lord will provide for you in Canada—"for," as the divine Blair says, "neither obscurity of station, nor imperfection of knowledge sink below his regard those who obey and worship him."'

With this trite quotation, the elder and the factor whipped up his pony, and departed with a couple of fat ducks dangling at its saddle-bow.

Next morning, the keepers arrived with their hampers of game on a cart, and as they entered the glen by the lower pass, the original inhabitants retired by the upper, (bearing their dead, their dying, the sick, aged, and little ones, slung in plaids over the shoulders of the stoutest men,) towards the only shelter that remained to them—and assuredly the last which the Gael would think of adopting—the old ruined chapel of St. Colme upon the sea-beaten rocks of the western coast, for, as no Highland landlord will allow the evicted tenants of another to tarry within his bounds, the graveyards alone are now the neutral ground. There among the tombs they formed a new bivouac above the long rank grass that wrapped their fathers' dust. Close by were the moss-covered and lichen-spotted ruins of the old chapel, where the owl and the bat had their nests, and where the sombre ivy grew in luxuriance—a place of many solemn memories and many legendary terrors.

Location of every kind was refused by the adjacent proprietors; so with a vast tract of wild and rugged mountains and pathless hunting forests around them, our people were compelled to herd like cattle within the circular wall of the burying-ground; for most of the modern tyrants of the North share alike the love of game, the lust of gold, and a horror of the Celtic race.

It was on the fourth day that the widow of the Ca-Dearg (whose head had been fractured by the blow of a baton) died; and a cry for vengeance against her murderers went up to heaven from the denizens of that uncouth bivouac, as they committed her body to the earth; and it was fortunate that all the rifles and weapons of the people had been seized; for in Callum's breast and mine, there swelled up such a glow of fury, that we would assuredly have committed some fierce and retributive act, at which all Britain would have been startled.

'Are we slaves?' exclaimed Callum, furiously; 'I speak in English, Mac Innon; for, thank heaven, the Gaelic is the only language in the world that has no word expressive of slavery.'

'A bootless boast,' said I, gloomily; 'and what matters it, when we may be murdered with impunity?'

'Evil has come upon us like snow upon the mountains, unsought and unsent for,' said he, as we closed the grave of the soldier's widow; 'poor old woman! Her blood has been shed by a staff that bore the royal crown and cypher—and for that crown her three brave sons are fighting in the East. A chial! a Highland soldier, or a Highland soldier's mother, are of less value than a grouse or plover—a sheep or a cow; for they cannot be shot for pleasure like the former, nor fattened to feed the southern market like the latter; and it is for a Government that treats us thus our soldiers fight and die! Is samhach an obair dol a dholaidh!'

'Alas, yes—silent is the progress of ruin!' I replied, repeating the proverb; 'but had our glen been in Tipperary, at what premium would the lives of Snaggs and Sir Horace been insured?'

'Sir Horace has driven us forth, that our glen may be peopled by wild animals; but if fire will burn, by the five wounds of God, and by the Black Stone of Scone, he will make little of that!' swore Callum, in a hoarse Gaelic whisper.

There was a dark and savage gleam in his hazel eyes as he spoke; and though aware that he referred to a project of vengeance, I cared not then to ask what it was.

Old Mhari was the wise woman and chief adviser and mediciner of the glen; she placed implicit belief in a hundred charms, spells, traditions, and absurdities that have come down to us through long and misty ages—yea, since the days of Fingal; for the supernatural is full of charms to the mind of a mountaineer. Thus Mhari was the custodier of one of those sanctified girdles which were usually kept in many Highland families, and which were bound about women in childbed. They were impressed with strange and mystic figures; and the ceremony of binding was accompanied by words of Druidical origin; but Mhari was sorely perplexed and bewildered when the wife of Gillespie Ruadh expired amid the tempest, with this ancient girdle of maternity around her.

In a revengeful spirit, that bordered on the necromantic malevolence of the olden time, she fashioned an image of clay, which she named 'Ephraim Snaggs,' and selecting a time when the moon was full, placed it in a runnel which distilled between the rocks from a lonely tarn, among the sedges of which the dusky water-ouzel laid its eggs, and where the lazy bittern, whose croak forebodes a storm, made its home; and she believed that as the stream washed away the clay, and reduced it to a shapeless mass, and from thence to mere mud, so would the ungainly person of Mr. Ephraim Snaggs waste, pine, and decay: but most unfortunately, and greatly to the injury of Mhari's local reputation, this incantation of the nineteenth century turned out a complete failure; for though the runnel washed away the image in less than three days, Snaggs remained unharmed and well as ever; for we frequently saw him trotting his pony along the mountain path which led to the house of Sir Horace Everingham.

Though supported by the secret charity of the neighbouring clachans, our poor people were meanwhile enduring great misery. Their nights were passed shelterless among the dreary shades of the dead—each mother with her children clinging round her in terror and hunger; for their principal sustenance had been herbs, mountain-berries, and cold water.

Each morning they thanked God that another night was past; and each night they thanked Him for the sorrowful day that was gone. The wind whistled drearily from the ocean round the open ruins, and over the long grassy graves, and bare, bleak headland of St. Colme. It seemed to bear on its breath a wailing sound, like a dirge of the dying, as it swept through the old yew-trees—but this, of course, was fancy.

With a heart that vibrated between love and hatred, anger and sorrow, I thought of Laura Everingham.

If the regret she expressed so prettily and so pithily for her father's previous severity and his Victor's cruelty was sincere, what would her emotions be now?

But days passed away, and no message from her ever reached me at that wretched hut, which the poor but hospitable priest had invited me to share. This neglect stung me to the soul, and caused an anger that not even the memory of Laura's winning kindness, the strange admissions of Snobleigh in the avenue, and the memory of her soft smile or the beauty of her person could subdue; but I knew not that during this, our time of calamity, she and Fanny Clavering were paying a visit to a noble marquis, whose exterminating propensities have made him famous as one of the chief 'Barriers to the prosperity of Scotland.'

Meanwhile Sir Horace, Sheriff Mac Fee, and Mr. Snaggs, after a voluminous correspondence with the Board of Supervision, had a steamer despatched to Loch Ora, to convey our people to Glasgow, where (without being landed) they were to be thrust like slaves on board of a vessel bound for America. Their final expatriation was fully resolved on by the trio; and none of the evicted were consulted either as to their wishes or destination, as they were alleged to be poor and ignorant Celts, who knew no language but their native Gaelic, and were helpless and stricken alike by poverty, sickness, and a wholesome terror of the powers that be.

The night was pitchy dark and somewhat stormy, when our poor outcasts saw the steamer that was to convey them for ever from their loved Highland home, ploughing the lonely waters of the deep salt loch that opened into the mountains; and a wail of despair ascended from the bleak burial promontory, as they heard the roar of the escaping steam, and the plunge of the descending anchor, when the vessel came to her moorings. Then the red light at her mast-head was watched for hours by the doomed and expatriated clansmen with emotions which no pen can describe, or pencil portray.

On this night it was averred that the white stag had been seen to hover near us in the gloom.

Low down along the base of Ben Ora, round the shore of the mirrored loch, and in the dark glen they had left, our people saw a wondrous blaze of light that illuminated the sky—that tinged the clouds with wavering fire, and lit the cold grey rocks and hills—the waving woods, and ghastly corries. It widened and grew on every hand, that marvellous sheet of flame, seeming to embrace the whole country in its fiery grasp; and with shouts of fear and wonder, the poor people, while gazing on this phenomenon, forgot for a time their own sorrows, and the approaching hour of their final expatriation.

CHAPTER XXI.
THE HEATHER ON FIRE!

On this night Callum and I were loitering in the glen, among the ruins of our once-peaceful and contented mountain hamlet; but oppressed by sadness, on witnessing the new desolation of the place, we wandered three or four miles away, and there older scenes of barbarity awaited us.

We sat down on some piles of stones that were half shrouded by the rising dog-grass, the moss, and the long feathery bracken. These marked the site of a few huts. Here once dwelt a brave little community named the Mac Ellars, one of whom had been my tutor, and here I had attended his little school, bringing each day with me, like other boys, a peat, as a contribution to his fire; for this is the old Highland custom, and the urchin who failed to do so was denied the privilege of warming his kilted legs for that day. Here often had I played the truant, and been threatened by my mother with the Druid—that venerable bugbear of the Highland urchin.

The Mac Ellars were all brave and hardy men, whose progenitors had occupied their 'holdings' since the days of Lachlan Mohr; and it was with them that Callum made the famous riot in Glen Ora, when burning the effigies of a certain English historian, and his miserable Scottish imitator, for their falsehoods and absurd antipathy to the clansmen and their national characteristics. But the youth of the clachan, twelve sturdy young lads, had been cajoled by a noble marquis and the duchess, his mother, into the ranks of the Sutherland Highlanders, and had marched to fight the Russians: then their cottages were levelled, and their aged parents were driven forth to beg, to starve, or die—tidings, no doubt, but ill-calculated to rouse the patriotism or fan the amor patriæ of the poor Celtic soldier, when chewing his green coffee in the frozen trenches of Sebastopol, or sinking under disease, with other victims of treachery and mismanagement, in the frightful hospital at Scutari; but fortunately for our Government, the poor clansman is animated by a love of home, which neither time can efface nor tyranny destroy. Thus were the Mac Ellars rooted out—the young sent to storm Sebastopol—the old to starve in the Lowlands, while the marquis and his passé mother were in a state of fervid Uncle Tommery, and, inspired by Mrs. Stowe's romance, were the leaders and patrons of anti-slavery meetings in the South, and fustian addresses to the women of America.

The ruined cottages which are met with at every few miles, amid the depopulated portions of our Highlands, dotting those vast glens which are silent and voiceless now as the most savage wilds of Hudson's Bay, or the great desert of Zahara, are well calculated to excite emotions of melancholy, as being the last relics of an old and departed race.

The wild gooseberry-bushes straggling among the stones; the old well, half choked by sand or weeds; the half-flattened fences; the garden-flowers growing rank among the encroaching heather, all told us the visual melancholy tale; and Callum and I sat in silence on the mossy stones, watching the daylight dying away beyond the distant sea, and full of our own sad and bitter thoughts.

He seemed wholly intent on polishing the butt of a steel Highland pistol, and while he did so, there hovered a dark and sombre aspect of ferocity on his brow.

We were silent, I have said, for both were too much oppressed to speak. Suddenly a black cock appeared on a fragment of rock near us, and clapped his wings as if in defiance. Quick as lightning Callum levelled the pistol and shot him dead; a moment the outstpread pinions beat the heather, and then lay still, while the pistol-shot was pealing among the echoes of the wilderness. My fosterer leisurely reloaded and brought the bird to me; it was large, weighing more than five pounds, its sable plumage glazed all over with a shining blue, and its stomach gorged with bilberries.

'I hope the report may not reach the ear of some rascally keeper,' said I, throwing a hasty glance about me; 'if so, we shall be accused of poaching. It was a risk, Callum, to shoot that bird just now.'

'It is the last shot I may ever have on a Highland mountain,' said Callum Dhu, with a fierce sigh; 'and with little regret would I have put the same ball into the fat brisket of Sir Horace himself, if he stood within twelve paces of me, on this red heather to-night.'

'For heaven's sake, Callum, do not speak thus,' said I; 'Sir Horace is less to blame than his evil mentor, Snaggs—I believe that in heart he is rather amiable.'

'Listen, Co-dhalta!' retorted Callum, turning upon me, and gazing with a full and angry frown. 'You love this man's daughter, and I like it as little as the good lady your mother (now, God rest her, in her grave) would have done. You love one who despises you—and yet your blood is as red as any in Scotland!'

'She does not despise me!' I responded, almost fiercely.

'Yet loving her is folly.'

'A folly that makes me happy.'

'A folly that makes you miserable! Will you remember her only as the daughter of one who has the lives of Gillespie's wife and child, and of the widow of the Oa-Dearg to answer for?'

'Sir Horace is no worse than the canting Marquis, or a hundred other proprietors in the North.'

'That is saying but little—there are many great men in Scotland still, deserving the dagger of Kirkpatrick and the bullet of Bothwellhaugh—and great is the pity that such pretty things have gone out of fashion. The best tune Rory Dall ever played men will tire of; and so I am tired of this Lowlander's tyranny.'

'He is no Lowlander, Callum,' said I, anxiously observing the fierce expression of my companion.

'He is an Englishman, which is almost as bad.'

I burst into a fit of laughter at this remark.

'Ah—you laugh,' said Callum, grimly; 'let us see whose laugh will be loudest to-morrow. He has cleared the glen of men to make way for game—let us see what he will gain by that—the club-footed ouzel.'

'How?' I asked, glancing in alarm at the pistol on which he was carefully placing a percussion cap.

'This very night I shall fire the heather.'

'For heaven's sake, Callum,' said I, 'beware what you do; for the consequent destruction of life and property may be terrible.'

'I care not—these lords and holiday-chiefs are destroying the people—let the people destroy the game that brings them gold. I will fire the heather, I tell you!' he added, in a fierce Gaelic whisper; 'by that blessed star which led the wise men to the cradle of God, I have sworn to do so, and it shall be done, come of it what may!'

I was about to speak again, when the clatter of hoofs rang on the mountain-path, and Mr. Snaggs passed us on his shaggy-coated cob. Anger swelled my breast on seeing him; but he bowed to us with an ironical smile, and we saw—or thought we saw—that his eyes were brilliant with malice at the success of that "ingenious ferocity" with which he had extirpated the peasantry of the district. He rode slowly up the slope of the great Ben, and the outlines of his ungainly figure and barrel-bellied charger appeared in dark relief between us and the yellow flush that bathed the western sky.

'What errand takes him to the Craig-na-tuirc to-night?' I remarked.

'The devil only knows: perhaps to see the desolation he has made, and whether any of our people have lit a fire in the glens below. There he goes—may evil follow, and destruction dog him close! may the curse of the poor on whom he tramples, and the scorn of the rich whom he worships, be his lot! I'll show them a flame on Ben Ora to-night that will startle all the Western Highlands!'

Callum drew forth his powder-horn, and after casting a keen but furtive glance around him in the dusk, and after seeing Mr. Snaggs fairly disappear in a hollow of the hills, he shook out the contents, laying across the narrow mouth of the glen a train on the soft dry heather and its bed of turf and decayed moss below. Careless of the event, and now resigned to whatever might follow, I observed him in moody silence, and not without feeling within me that longing for revenge which is so curiously mingled in the Celtic nature, with a wild sense of justice and of injury.

'This is a crime against the law,' said I, in a low voice, remembering that muirburning is a serious offence in Scotland, and that the Acts passed by the Parliaments of the first, third, fourth, and fifth Jameses concerning it, are alike stringent and severe.

'Curse upon the laws,' grumbled Callum; 'if none were made, they would never be violated,' and with these words he emptied the last contents of his horn. Again he looked round him.

The sun had set long since; the tints of the vast mountain had turned from purple to black, and no living thing seemed to be stirring in that intense solitude. Callum stooped, and fired his pistol at the train. The powder flashed, and rose like a fiery serpent along the grass; the dry summer-moss, the decayed leaves and dead ferns ignited like tinder, and in a moment the thick heath and its bed of turf and peat below were wrapped in smoke and flame—a flame that spread on every hand, deepening and extending, as it rolled, like a devouring and encroaching tide, mounting up the sides of the glen before the soft west wind that blew from the dark waves of the salt lake.

Fiercely it crackled, smouldered, and burned, in those places where the bracken or whins, the burr-docks, brambles, rank weeds, and gorse grew thick; but in others it rolled steadily on with great rapidity, spreading and widening in the form of a vast semi-circle, as if it would embrace the whole country in its grasp. As it mounted into the higher portions of the landscape, and seized on the thickets of silver birch and the resinous mountain-pine, the conflagration began to crackle, roar, and hiss, and its flames to shoot aloft and brighten against the sky like the wavering beams of the Northern Lights, tinging the clouds with pink and purple hues.

Now sheep and cattle, horses, rabbits, foxes, and fuimarts, with herds of frantic deer, fled before the flames; and screaming in their terror and confusion, the muirfowl flew hither and thither, or hung overhead among the vapour that shrouded the starry sky. The scene was strange, wild, and terrible; the more so that amid all this general alarm of nature there was not heard the voice of man in wonder or in fear; but the glens had been swept of their people, and the beasts of the field and the birds of the air alone remained.

With astonishment and somewhat of awe, I gazed on this strange and striking scene, while Callum Dhu surveyed it with a grim smile of triumph and derision on his weather-beaten face, which was reddened by the distant glow.

This was one of the most dreadful instances of muirburning that ever occurred in Scotland: the flames travelled at the rate of one hundred and fifty yards a minute, and soon embraced a front of nearly sixteen miles in length, being four miles more than that tide of fire which lately devoured the moors of Strathaven.

The whole of the muirlands—covered with short dry summer heather, the thickets of fir and the game preserves round the base of Ben Ora, from the mouth of the glen where we sat to the deep dark gorge of Garchoine, from the shore of the loch on the east to the hazel wood of Coilchro on the west, where the narrow path to St. Colme's chapel overhangs the foaming sea—a semicircle, as I have said, of sixteen miles—were sheeted in red and yellow flame. Above the mighty wreaths of smoke which rose from the blazing and falling plantations, and from the remains of old primeval forests, towered the huge mountain—the monarch of the western hills—like a dark and wonderous dome. At its base lay the loch gleaming in light, and seeming, in this nocturnal blaze, like a mighty mirror zoned by the smoke and fire, which gradually crept from the low districts upward to the summit of the craigs and hills, where it played in streaks of deep and fiery red, or flashed upward in forky and lambent flames before it died away in vapour.

In the deep and naked ravines, and those places over which the fire had passed, sweeping like a burning tide, the nests and lairs of the game, with every trace of animal and vegetable life, passed away, leaving only the bare black roots of the turf and heather, while vast columns of smoke hung motionless, like giants in mid-air as if the fires of the Day of Doom had sent them forth; and through these murky masses the broad round moon at times peered dimly and darkly out, like Fingal's shield, half hidden and half seen.

'Down, Mac Innon, down!' cried Callum, as a herd of terrified deer came rushing like a living torrent down a narrow ravine, which was threaded by a mountain stream, up the margin of which we were now ascending, as being the safest pathway through this land of fire: 'Hoigh! look at Mac Gilonie's dun cattle, how they come thundering down with the sparks at their heels!'

These words were barely uttered, when the frantic herd—three hundred and more—were upon us, with all their branching antlers lashing the air; but as we threw ourselves flat on our faces among the long bracken and dog-grass, this four-footed tempest swept lightly over us, and disappeared towards the seashore.

'There they go towards the Atlantic—dun deer and red foxes, fat hares and long-eared rabbits, fuimarts, otters, and everything! By the blood that is in us, Sir Horace, but it is mighty little shooting you or yours will have hereabout for these some years to come! The people have gone towards the sea, and your devilish game have followed them. But see,' added Callum; 'what is that—a man mounted on a deer?'

'No, no—a pony.'

'How he gallops! Dioul! my fine fellow, take care of your neck.'

'It is Snaggs!' said I.

'Snaggs—and he rides like fury—up hill too! now the pony falls—'

'He is down!'

'Up again—on foot, and he runs like a sow possessed by a devil towards the Craig-na-tuirc, with the fire rolling at his heels,' said Callum, rubbing his hands in fierce glee.

'Fire behind and a precipice in front.'

'Dioul—we are giving him claw for claw at last!'

'But we must save him, Callum—he will be scorched to death or dashed to pieces.'

A fierce laugh was his only reply. While all this passed in less time than I have taken to record it, we dashed along the stony ravine, guided by the rivulet, and though half-blinded by smoke, reached the Ora, which was there overhung by the Craig-na-tuirc. At that moment a wild and despairing cry for succour rang in the air above us.

'Ay, bay to the moon, false wolf—but there are few ears now in Glen Ora to hear you!' growled Callum through his thick, rough beard, as we began rapidly to clamber up the brow of the precipice, the summit of which was shrouded by smoke, and streaked with fire like the crater of a volcano.

CHAPTER XXII.
THE UISC DHU.

Hawks, gleds, and eagles, with a hundred birds of other kinds, whose nests had been destroyed, were screaming, as if in anger or surprise, and flapping their wings about us, in the mid and murky air, as we clambered up, and thrice the wild cry of the despairing wretch tingled in my ears, before we reached the summit, after a half-hour of arduous exertion.

There, on the giddy verge, a strange sight awaited us.

Not far from the spot where Callum had rescued Sir Horace Everingham, and at a place where the steep rocky brow of the cliffs overhung the dark chasm through which the foaming waters of the black river bellowed, roared, and forced a passage towards the sea, we saw the miserable factor Snaggs dangling in mid-air like a crow, and clinging to the branches of a tough but withered mountain-ash, and to its stem, which—terrible to conceive!—projected over this dark Cimmerian gulf. Hemmed in on every side by the encroaching fire, which ran at his heels, he had been forced to retreat upward to the edge of the rock, and though all unused to feats of strength or agility, excess of terror had supplied him with both; for when the flames assailed the thick coating of turf, soft heather, and crackling whins which covered the summit of the Craig, he was compelled to take refuge in the branches of the mountain-ash, and to these he clung, swinging above the dark vacuity below, with a tenacity of clutch and a horror impossible to portray.

But now the same fire which had consumed the tufted whins, the turf and heath, assailed the dry roots of the ash which twined among them, and soon the whole fabric of the tree was in a blaze; and as its fibres crackled and relaxed their tough grasp of the rocks and smouldering turf, the stem began to sink and yield with its own weight, and the weight of the fainting sinner who clung to it.

Such was the terrible tableau that awaited us on reaching a ledge of rock close by it.

As seen by the fitful glimpses of the moon through gauzy clouds and rolling smoke, the pale, white, ghastly visage of Snaggs was appalling. He still shrieked for succour and for mercy, and his entreaties were but a succession of shrill screams like those of a girl. His eyes glared; foam hung upon his lips, and his tongue was parched and swollen. I would have hastened to proffer him assistance, but the strong hands of Callum held me back by main force.

'Mercy to the merciless?' said he; 'nay—he shall have such mercy as he gave the people of our glens—such mercy as he would have given my poor Minnie at the Clach-na-greiné. He is a fiend—so let him die a fiend's death! Ha—ha! Mr. Snaggs—the tree is bending now; once it rose at the angle of forty-five, now it is quite horizontal. I wish every factor hung on its branches like fruit for the devil. Think of the old widow of the Ca-Dearg, and her silver hair all clotted in her blood; think of the cold, grey morning that dawned on the wet mountain-side, when the dying wife of the Red Gillespie lay with her new-born babe, and expired without a shelter from the blast! Her babe is now where you can never be—for it is among the flowers that are gathered in heaven! Think of the cruel advice you have given this jolter-headed stranger—this Horace Everingham—whose presence has been a curse to us. Think of my Minnie and the evil you intended for her. Think of all your hypocrisy, your legal quirks and quibbles, and of all the villanies of your past life, for the root of the tree burns bravely, and will not last a minute more. Ha! ha! ha!'

The love of life, the lust of gold, and the dread of death and hell grew strong within the wretched soul of Snaggs, and his aspect became frightful. Matted by perspiration, his hair clung about his temples, and his eyes were starting from their sockets. With all the tenacity that love of existence, conflicting with an awful fate, can impart to the sinews of a coward, he clung to that withered ash, and swung wildly over the hideous abyss, where the black water foamed two hundred feet below.

Now his toes touched the brow of the rock, and anon his feet would beat the empty air in vain! The flames played about the roots; the smoke almost choked him, and slowly, gradually, fearfully the stem continued to sink and to yield, as the knotty fibres which so long had grasped the rocks were relinquishing their hold at last.

'Mercy—mercy—mercy!' he shrieked.

'Such mercy as you gave the people in Glen Ora and Glentuirc—such mercy as you have ever given the poor and the trusting, I give you now—a tiger's mercy!' replied Callum, still holding me back, though it was physically impossible for me to have afforded the least assistance to Snaggs, circumstanced as he was then, and cut off from us by the flaming tree.

'God—God!' gasped the miserable wretch.

'Call not on Him, hypocrite, for even He may fail one so steeped in wickedness as you. Hear me—I am Callum Dhu Mac Ian, on whom you have never ceased to heap up insult, contumely, and contempt. I am well and young, and strong, having, with God's blessing, many years of life before me, while you are now in the jaws of death. You will go down into the depth of that dark linn like a stone, Mr. Snaggs; a splash, a bubble, and all will be over! One sinner more will have gone to his awful account—'

'Mercy!' he croaked.

The tree was still burning and bending!

'A time will come, a week, a month, a season perhaps, and the deep waters of Loch Ora will give up the ghastly dead. A corpse, swollen, hideous and frightful beyond all humanity, will be cast upon the pebbled beach, and it may lie there long undiscovered, amid gnats that swarm in the sunshine of noon, and birds that scream in the night—ay, very long, for our glens are desolate now, and for months a human foot may never press the heather there. That corpse will be yours, Mr. Snaggs! When found, it will excite awe and wonder, for the foolish mother that bore you would not know her sinful son; but anon horror and disgust will force the finders to cover it hastily up with earth and stones; and there you will rot, Mr. Snaggs, while your ill-gotten gear will be spent and enjoyed by others.'

'Oh, have mercy upon me!' howled Snaggs, who now ceased to make the smallest exertion, as every movement served more and more to dislodge the consuming root. 'Mercy—I tell you—mercy; my dear, good man, have mercy!'

'Dioul! how long that tree holds on!' cried Callum, stamping his foot; 'but now it bends! now it breaks! Hoigh—one moment more and all will be over, Mr. Snaggs!'

The white lips of the victim quivered; he was uttering a voiceless prayer—or perhaps it was the more contortion and convulsing of his features. The fitful light of the moon, and occasionally the gleams of the blazing heather and distant thickets, played on the rocks and wild plants of the chasm, imparting a satanic effect to the episode.

Suddenly the tree snapped with a crash that made my heart leap, and with a cry, amid a shower of sparks that flew upward, Snaggs vanished with the half-burned stem into the black gulf below, where the fierce and foaming mountain-torrent swept them away like autumn leaves, towards the deeper waters of the Loch, and the more distant waves of the Atlantic.

I never heard that his corpse was found.

'It is God's judgment,' said Callum, who had gazed frigidly at this terrible sight, the realities of which I could not reconcile for a time, or believe to be palpable and true.

CHAPTER XXIII.
THE RUINED COTTAGE.

'Those who do injuries to others,' says the delightful author of I promessè Sposi, 'are not only accountable for the evil they inflict, but also for the perversion of sentiment which they cause in their victims.' I am happy that this trite sentence occurred to me, for by this mode of reasoning we shall find Mr. Snaggs alone guilty of Callum's unusual hardness of heart, and, in short, the author of his own untimely demise.

Chilled and almost terrified by the new and awful events of the night, I hastened away by the route we had come, descending the face of the rocks towards that part of the stream which lay below the cascade, and proceeding along its banks among the wet water-docks and green leaves which the fire, that was still raging in many parts of the muirland district. had failed to consume. Midnight was past now. The moon was waning behind the summit of the scorched and burning hills. We were weary and looked about us for a shelter; but in every direction the country seemed dotted by the fires which yet smouldered in the thickets and morasses, reddening and flashing in every puff of wind.

'Free—but homeless, houseless, penniless, and desperate!' said I.

'A chial!' responded my fosterer; 'how many brethren we have in this wide world, which is all before us now!'

A ruined cottage afforded us a resting-place, and there we threw ourselves down upon the thick soft grass that was springing up within its four bare walls of turf and boulder-stones. I was so overcome by lassitude, that even the supernatural terrors of this place failed to scare me from it, and Callum, who would rather have passed the night in any other part of the mountains, could not leave me. A mouthful of whisky from his hunting-flask revived us, and to change the current of my thoughts, which were incessantly and upbraidingly reverting to the terrible scenes we had just witnessed, he told me several wild and quaint stories of Dougald-with-the-Keys, the former occupant of the ruined cottage, and in whose service Callum had been when a boy.

Dougald was a smuggler and distiller of illicit spirits. He had his manufactory in a hollow of the adjacent morass, a high rock overlooking which was the post of his scout. Malie, his lynx-eyed wife, generally watched for the hated exciseman, who might be wandering along the road from Inverness or Tain. He was named Dougald-with-the-Keys, from a bunch of mysterious keys which he bore at his sporran-belt. These rattled when he walked, and gave him, it was averred, a mysterious power; for once, when conveying to Inverness two casks of the mountain-dew, slung across a stout pony, two excisemen gave him chase, and being well mounted, were about to make a capture of Dougald's distillation; but near the source of the Ora he shook his keys at them, and plucking a sprig of rowan, planted it by the wayside, uttering certain strange and terrible words. On approaching the sprig, the pursuers felt themselves constrained to alight from their saddles, and to dance round it furiously, hand-in-hand, while Dougald laughed and proceeded safely on his journey towards the Highland capital. The frantic and involuntary gyrations of the unfortunate excisemen were continued for more than two hours, until a passing shepherd pulled up the rowan-sprig, dissolved the spell, and permitted them to fall prostrate on the road, breathless, powerless, terrified, and resolved never more to meddle with Dougald, who continued to smuggle and distil in success and security, and had large sums to his credit, standing in the books of various discreet retailers in the vicinity of the Clachnacudden.

Once upon a time Callum had been despatched thither for payment, and was returning to the glen with a purse well filled with silver 'Georges,' and mounted on the active shelty which usually carried the casks. Pleased with the large sum he had to pay over to the gloomy, fierce, and avaricious Dougald, he switched up the nag as he entered the glen, and hastened on, for the double purpose of ridding himself of this important cash, and obtaining his supper.

The cottage and its little outhouses were buried in obscurity when he approached them; all was dark, yet the hour was not late, and, save a real or fancied sound of lamentation, all was still. According to his usual custom, Callum rode straight to the stable door, slipped from the bare-backed pony, which he had ridden in the Highland fashion, in his kilt, sans bridle and crupper. On opening the door, for the purpose of bedding and foddering the little nag, he heard a well-known rattling of keys. The sound seemed to be in the air! The pony started—snorted—perspired and trembled; its eyes shot fire; its fore-feet were firmly planted on the ground, and remained immovable. Again the keys were heard rattling, and between him and the moon, Callum saw the figure of Dougald pass like a shadow along the summit of the little garden wall. The pony then sprang into the stable with a convulsive bound. An indescribable emotion—a horror filled the heart of my fosterer; and closing his eyes, lest he might see something still more appalling, he flung down a few armfuls of hay and straw to the pony, locked the stable door, and sprang into the cottage, to find Dougald stretched on the floor, a corpse, and his wife, Malie, lamenting over him; for at the instant Callum had seen his figure passing, as it were, through the air, he had sunk down and expired of some disease unknown.

Such stories as these, and others, Callum related in low and impressive whispers, and his powerful and poetical Gaelic, which invested every trifle with pathos or with terror, were but ill calculated to soothe a mind which ever and anon in fancy saw the pale visage and glaring eyes of Snaggs; thus I was glad when the breaking day began to brighten in the east, and we left the ruined hut of Dougald the Smuggler to survey the country, which was all black, burned, and desolate. Its aspect was strange and terrible; a sea of flame seemed to have rolled over it, sweeping every trace of life and verdure from its surface. The origin of that nocturnal fire was then involved in mystery; but the game over eighteen square miles was irretrievably destroyed, and Callum laughed in scorn.

'Let this be a hint for our Highlanders!' said he.

The desolation of the scene was now complete, as that which Abraham saw of old, when looking towards the cities of the Doomed, he beheld the smoke of The Land of the Plain, ascending as the smoke of a furnace. A stripe of green was lingering on the lofty places, but all was scorched below; thus

"In mountain or in glen,
Nor tree, nor plant, nor shrub, nor flower,
Nor aught of vegetative power,
The wearied eye may ken;
But all its rocks at random thrown,
Black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone."

All this occurred only three years ago, but subsequent events have rendered the concealment of poor Callum's name unnecessary now.

Three days elapsed before the fire exhausted itself, or was extinguished, on the thickets being cut down in some places by the axe, and the heather torn up in others, to bar their progress.

Meanwhile the sufferings of the poor evicted people, who were bivouacked in the burial-ground of St. Colme, had been terrible. In their hunger and despair, some of them had made a species of meal or flour from the leaves and seed of the wild mustard, and bruising them together, had kneaded a kind of cake, which, when eaten with mountain herbs, brought on deadly inflammations and fluxes, of which they died so fast, that the frightful condition of the survivors reached the ears of the humane in the Lowlands. But why dwell on a subject that is of daily occurrence in the Scottish Highlands, and with the hourly horrors of which the columns of the northern press are constantly filled?

A subscription was prepared for them, in common with the miserable Rosses, who were then being driven out of Sutherland, and the starved Mac Donnels, who were then hunted down like wild beasts in Glenelg; but this relief was soon abandoned, through the malevolence of the usual enemy of the Celtic population—a scurrilous Edinburgh print, of which Mac Fee, in common with other small wits of the Scottish Parliament House, was of course a supporter. Charity thus arrested and withheld, the result proved most fatal to the poor people of Glen Ora, who died daily—the strong man and the tender child together.

At last, as I have stated, the authorities, who had been packing our peasantry in ships like negroes from Africa, and despatching them in naked hordes from Isle Ornsay and elsewhere to America and Australia, proposed to the miserable remnant of the Mac Innons that they too should sail for that far-off land of the West, where the sun of the Celtic tribes is setting, and with something of despair they consented, for the most cruel and terrible ultimatum—death by starvation and exposure menaced them all.

I will pass over the touching scenes that ensued when the last of our people were torn from their native district, every feature and memory of which were entwined around their hearts—torn from their ruined homes—their father's lonely graves—from all they had loved since childhood, and when they were thrust, without regard to sex or age, on board of a small steamer in Loch Ora, for conveyance to Glasgow, where the great emigrant—or Celtic slave-ship, the Duchess, awaited them.

Many of these poor people, after the usual custom of the evicted Highlanders, made up little packages of earth—their native soil—-to bear it with them to the wilds of America, as a relic or memento of their country; and in the hope that, in this little handful might be the seeds of the heather-bell and other native plants and flowers. Strong, deep, and undying is this pure and noble—this holy love of home, in the Highland heart. The unavailing sorrow, the unheeded agony, the mental and bodily misery of our evicted emigrants is a theme so constantly before the public, that we now regard the depopulation of a valley as quite a usual occurrence, like the fall of the leaf or the coming of summer; hence I will pass over this part of iny narrative as briefly as possible.

The people sailed for Glasgow, and Callum and I, who were to follow and join them in a day or two, stood on the shore of the loch, and saw the steamer ploughing through its still blue waters, as it bore away the sad and wailing freight.

Near us, on the beach, knelt a man in prayer; his white hairs were glistening in the setting sun; his eyes were bent upon the lessening steamer, and his hands were stretched towards her. This was old Father Raouil, who was sending his last blessing after those on whose faces he would never look again.

Near him knelt Callum Dhu, with his bare knees in the sand, and his rough sunburned face covered by his bonnet—for the strong man had now given way, and was weeping like a child.

We are literally the last of the clan.

We watched the steamer till she diminished to a speck, and vanished round a promontory; then we turned away, and, mechanically and in silence, ascended the desolate mountains, a community of thought—a unity of sentiment—leading us instinctively towards the deserted glen, although neither home nor tie remained unto us there.

CHAPTER XXIV
THE WHITE STAG.

The excitement of this temporary separation over, my thoughts now reverted to Laura Everingham, whom I had not seen since the day of my mother's funeral, and from whom I was now on the verge of being separated for ever—separated so hopelessly, that my heart sickened at the contemplation.

Oh how different were my fate, my fortune and position from those of that bright and happy girl, whose sunny English face and beaming eyes spoke only of a heart that had never known care or thought or bitterness. Now budding from the spring of youth into the summer of womanhood, her figure, though rather undersized, was beautiful and graceful, lithe and faultless, as all her pretty little ways were amiable and winning. There was a romance in loving her—a desperation in it that excited all my ardour; and (as Washington Irving says) 'do not let us consider whatever is romantic as incompatible with real life.'