'Can other come to us now, Minnie?' said I; 'but take my fish-basket—I have brought a good stipper from the Uisc Dhu and Loch Ora.'
I then entered the little dining-room where we usually had all our meals served up.
I see it yet in memory.
Like many apartments in old Highland houses, its ceiling was low, pannelled with fir, and painted in a dull white colour; the stone fireplace, heavily moulded, bore the motto of the Mac Innons, Cuimhuich bas Alpin, in raised letters, and the grate, a little brass-knobbed basket, at which, as my nurse affirmed, Prince Charles had once warmed his royal feet, stood upon two blocks of stone. A few old prints of battles in black frames, an oil-portrait or two, an old ebony table, with a huge family-bible, an inverted punch-bowl cracked and riveted, chairs of a fashion that has long since disappeared from the Lowlands, made up the plenishing of this little chamber, which was alike my mother's dining-room and peculiar sanctum sanctorum—and the palladium of which, were the old gilt gorget and regimental claymore of my father, suspended above the chimney-piece. He had worn these during the campaigns with the Black Watch in Egypt and in Spain.
With gold spectacles on nose, my mother, a thin, pale woman of a dignified aspect, in an old-fashioned costume, with black silk mittens on her hands, was seated in her cushioned chair, affecting to work at some ornament or article of attire, which lay on a little tripod table. She seemed nervous and agitated; how could she be otherwise, when opposite sat he, who was the horror of the glens from Lochness to Loch Ora—Ephraim Snaggs, with his malevolent visage, perched on the top of a bamboo-cane, over the silver knob of which his hands were crossed.
Bald-headed, hollow in the temples, with a prominent chin, and more of the serpent than the dove in his sinister grey eye, there sat Mr. Snaggs with his truculent smile, and an affectation of sympathy on his tongue.
'Beware, sir, of what you say,' my mother was exclaiming, 'for ours is an honoured line—an ancient house.'
'So I perceive,' said Snaggs, impertinently, as he fixed his eyes on a very palpable hole in the ceiling; 'ah, the old story—the old story, Mrs. Mac Innon! Bad times and no price for sheep, eh? I would beg to remind you, my dear madam, that a certain pious writer says, "However unfortunate we may deem ourselves, yet let us remember there is an eye watching over us; it is a heavenly will, not a blind fate, that guides the world;" ah me—ah me!'
Fire and pride were flashing in my mother's dark grey eyes as I entered; then she burst into tears, and throwing down her work, exclaimed to me in Gaelic, and with all the spirit of the olden time—
'My son, God has sent you here in a lucky hour! I have come of a race that have smiled often in the face of death—why then, do I weep before this wretched worm?'