"The end had come. What is a stone-armed mob against soldiers with ball cartridge!
"So we gave in, and I myself advanced with a white rag tied to my stick as a flag of truce.
"But the officer in charge was furious. He must do his duty, he said. He had dallied too long. Out we must turn. He would give us an hour to save any small articles we valued, no more.
"Oh, madam, fancy the sadness of that night! The old, the young, and the infirm were turned forth into the bleak cold of a wind-swept glen. The sick were carried out in blankets, and put down on the bare green braes to die or to live.
"Then at midnight every hamlet was fired, and the glen was lit up by a blood-red blaze that tipped even the distant hills with carmine, while tongues of flame, mounting every moment higher and higher, seemed to lick up the rolling clouds of smoke, while showers of sparks, thick as flakes of snow in a winter's storm, were carried far away to leeward.
"I was dazed. I knew not what to do. I knelt beside my poor Mary, but she spoke not. How cold her hand was! And her face. 'Ah,' I shrieked, 'my wife, my wife is dead!'
"I remember nothing more. I had fainted, but in the dusk of the morning I recovered my senses. Not only was Mary dead, but poor baby had rolled over her on to the grass, and there lay stark and stiff."
Tears were trickling down the hermit's cheeks, and it was some time before he felt fit to continue his story.
"Ah, madam," he said, "that was a sad morning. The people of the glen, I could just see, were all loaded on to that steamer, which was to bear them away, far away across the broad Atlantic. I could hear their weeping and wailing, I could see the women wringing their hands and the men tearing their hair as they gazed on the land they should never see again. The soldiers, too, were on board, and steam up. Speedily she rounded the cape, and I was left alone with the dead.
"All that day I lay beside Mary and baby, and all the next bleak, cold night. The people that crowded in kindness to the deserted glen could not get me to move.