It was when the party had reached a spot where the path rose in zigzags and made its slippery way across the face of a steep slaty cliff that they suddenly discovered they were in an ambuscade under the command of Helen Macgregor herself. The desperate fight that followed, all in favour of the outlaws who commanded the situation; the ludicrous plight of the fat little Bailie, who, caught by the back of the coat on a projecting thorn-bush, swung in mid-air, “where he dangled not unlike the sign of the Golden Fleece over the door of a mercer in the Trongate of his native city”—are not these things writ in the ever-enduring pages of Rob Roy? More awful was the doom of Morris the Gauger, or Exciseman, who was dragged out, condemned as a spy, and drowned by the aid of a large stone bound in a plaid about his neck. “Half naked and thus manacled, they hurled him into the lake, there about twelve feet deep, with a loud halloo of vindictive triumph, above which, however, his last death shriek, the yell of mortal agony, was distinctly heard.”
The lake thus woven into the tale is supposed to be Loch Ard. The Falls of Ledard, at the north-western end, are the falls described by Scott in Waverley, as he himself has owned, though it must be confessed in so doing he lifted them from their setting. Flora MacIvor’s song—
There is mist on the mountain and night on the vale,
But more dark is the sleep of the sons of the Gael
—is descriptive of this scenery.
“Rebels and Mossers”
But the Pass of Aberfoyle has scenes of real history to tell as well as those of fiction. General Monk led his men through it after addressing a letter to the Earl of Airth, desiring him to have the woods in certain districts of Aberfoyle cut down, because they were “grete shelters to the rebels and mossers.”
In the pass, also, the Earl of Glencairn and Graham of Duchray defeated some of the Cromwellian soldiers, and, adds Mr. Cunninghame Graham in recounting the incident, “Graham of Duchray no doubt fought all the better because the Cromwellians had burnt his house the night before the action, in order to show him that it was unwise to attach too much importance to mere houses built with hands.”
Aberfoyle is supposed to be peculiarly haunted by the “little folk”—i.e., the fairies—a reputation it gained from a seventeenth-century minister, who was supposed to be in league with them. He is frequently mentioned by Scott, and the fairy knowe, opposite the hotel, on which he sank down dead, called back to the fairyland he loved so well, is still pointed out. He,
When the roaring Garry ran