In this they showed their wisdom. The auld laird McGregor sent them a most affecting letter. “Their sorrows,” it ended, “and his own misfortune had broken his heart, and though he could see them no more in life, his thoughts and mind were with them.”
True, for the auld laird lived scarcely a year after the eviction of Glen Alva.
But with a portion of the remains of his fortune he paid the passage money to America of as many of his tenants as were willing to accept his offer.
I would not harrow the feelings of my readers by describing the last sad scene in Glen Alva, when in the darkness of night the people were turned out; when more than seventy houses—well, call them huts, they were homesteads, at all events—were given to the flames; when the aged and the sick were laid on the bare hillside to shiver and to die; and when neither the wail of the widow nor plaintive cry of the suffering infant could move to pity or mercy the minions of the Yankee laird, who preferred deer to human beings.
Selah!
Chapter Ten.
The Last Link is Broken.
“Farewell, farewell, my native land,
Thy lonely glens and heath-clad mountains.”