'What means this, Allan?' asked the poor woman, in a voice of tenderness and alarm; but I made no reply. 'An empty purse, you have not—oh, you cannot have spent or lost the money?'

'Neither, dear mother—but pity me and bear with the weakness you have taught me?'

'What have you done?'

'Listen and you shall hear.'

I detailed to her the shooting, and told how Callum and I were the victors at any distance from one to five hundred yards, and how we showered our bullets into the bull's-eye, as fast as the markers could count them; how we challenged all to shoot seven consecutive balls into the black cross on the tower of the Thanes; how none save Callum and I could touch it at two hundred yards—a feat such as the Highlands had seldom seen before, and how we won the prizes.

I related how the hateful Snaggs had been there with musty morality on his oily tongue, and a hateful smile in his deep grey eye; how he had uttered sneers to which (without seeming to commit an outrage) I could not reply. I told her of the shame I endured when competing with shepherds and foresters for a prize, even from a lady's hand. I the heir of an old and respected line, and with all the pride in which she had reared me, swelling in my heart; I told her of the wily factor's taunts, and how Callum and I had flung the gold with scorn among the people, and departed from that great and long wished-for gathering on the Braes as poor as when this morning, so full of hope and spirit, we had marched over the mountains to attend it.

My mother heard me quietly to the end, and then applauded me as warmly as her feeble strength would permit. But I failed to feel this approval in my own heart, when beholding the emptiness of our household—the lack of comforts—yea almost of common food; and I cursed the pride that made me scorn a prize, which though less than a bagatelle to some—to you, my good reader, I hope—would have been a Godsend to our half-famished family at Glen Ora.

Then Laura's face and eyes, her voice and accents came before me, and I fell, I knew not why, into a dreamy reverie over all I did.

My mother's illness and our penury pressed heavily on my soul. A lofty barrier seemed to surround me; a girdle of evils—a boundary beyond which I saw no outlet, from which there was no escape, and which I dared not and knew not how to surmount. Too proud to beg, and ashamed to dig, I became bewildered as the evil hour approached, when the authorities would arrive to evict the people of the glen. For the whole of the previous day no food passed my lips; I found eating impossible, I felt as one over whom hung a sentence of death; a dark, inevitable, and unavertible fate; and with the apathy of despair I saw the morning of the sixth day dawn, when the messengers and constables, or perhaps the soldiery from Fort William, would arrive to extinguish the fires, unroof the houses, and drive the people away.

Thoughts of armed, manly, and determined resistance floated darkly and fiercely through my mind; and I am certain that the same ideas were hovering before Callum, as he sat by his humble but untasted breakfast, sharpening his skene dhu, cleaning, oiling and examining his favourite rifle, the crack of which might never more wake the echoes of the mountains; and our pretty Minnie watched him the while with loving and anxious eyes. There were weapons enough in the cottages to arm the men of the glen, and their number was sufficient to have held against three thousand red coats, the gorge that led to the valley, for there our grandfathers had made a long and desperate defence against the ruffianly Huskes Brigade in 1746, and we were able to do as much again; but the steamers had opened up the lochs in our rear; and though we might have repelled the authorities for a few days, we were sure of being overcome and severely chastised in the end; thus the rash and dangerous idea to taking arms to defend our old hereditary hearths and homes was no sooner formed than it was dismissed.