'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.'