My gloomy forebodings increased as the brilliance of morning descended from the mountain slopes into the deep and dreamy glens, and as I hastened down the narrow path which led to my mother's house. No smoke was wreathing upward from its chimneys, and there was an aspect of still life about it which surprised and alarmed me. The door was wide open—an unusual circumstance. Anon, I saw a number of persons hastening to and fro between the cottages of the glen, and a little crowd of men and women gradually collected round the house. A deadly terror smote my heart, and every pulse stood still. Then my ears tingled, as a cry of lamentation woke the silent echoes of the valley. I sprang down the mountain side, rushed through the startled clachan, and at the door of the house met old Mhari, her eyes red with weeping. She threw her arms round me.

'My mother?' I exclaimed.

'She is dying!' replied the sobbing woman, in her own figurative language; 'she must soon be laid in the Place of Sleep, with her feet to the rising sun.'

'Dying!' I ejaculated.

'Why protract the poor lad's misery?' said a gentleman, who wore a suit of accurate black, with a white neckcloth, and silver spectacles, and whom I knew to be the doctor of the district, and a great enemy of old Mhari, for whose universal specific for all complaints (wild garlic boiled with May butter) he had a great contempt; 'why add to what he must suffer?—tell him at once, that he may bear his loss like a Christian and a man. Mac Innon, your mother is dead—God help you, my poor fellow!'

It was so—dead—and now I had not a relation, not a friend in the world, but the poor people of the glen, to whom I was bound by the common ties of clanship and descent. On learning that I had gone to visit Sir Horace, and knowing well my fiery temper and proud disposition, my mother's gentle breast had been filled by a hundred tender anxieties and thoughts of danger. Finding herself alone for a little space, animated by what purpose heaven only knows—perhaps by a restless desire to breathe the fresh air of the glen for the last time; perhaps to look for me, or perhaps to test the worth of the old tradition, and so rid herself of a life that had become a burden; inspired by some mysterious impulse, and endued thereby with more than her wonted strength of thought and purpose, she had robed herself in a plaid and wrapper, and left her bed unseen, for she was found dead—dead on the rustic seat beside the porch, and consequently beyond the walls of the jointure-house. Here she was found by Callum Dhu, on his returning with our doctor, a dapper little country practitioner, whose attempts to restore animation proved utterly unavailing.

'Dhia! Dhia!' was the exclamation of Callum; 'assuredly the curse of the Red Priest is here!'

'Curse of—what do you say, my good man?' asked the doctor, with a cross air of perplexity; 'it is the result of an inward complaint under which she long laboured. She was highly susceptible—nervous—sickly and sensitive—I was always quite prepared for this fatal termination.'

'But you never said so till now,' retorted Callum; 'so what avails your skill. Had she only kept within the door she might have lived long enough.'

I now felt myself above the reach of further misfortune. I had been the mark of Fate's sharpest arrows, and a proud but fierce emotion of defiance swelled within me for a time. Even Snaggs and the coming terrors of the eviction were forgotten now. Thus I felt buoyed up, as it were, by a courage gathered from the very depth of my despair; but anon, the sense of loneliness that fell upon me was crushing and profound.