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.'