There was no motion; he placed a hand on the rector's heart; but there was no pulsation. He was dead—dead, but still warm.
At that moment the clock of the college tolled the half-hour after twelve!
Thus as he had so long foretold and foreseen, but by what mysterious intuition or presentiment, Heaven alone knows, he had actually passed away on the early morning of the sixteenth day of November.
* * * * * *
The French cavalry were still pressing on, and the jaded allies were still in full retreat; thus the Scottish fathers of the ancient college hurried the funeral by the next noon, that the Lieutenant of the Black Watch might lay his brother's head in the grave; and accordingly the rector was lowered into the tomb which his own hands had formed before the shrine of St. Margaret, the Patroness of Scotland; and Dick Duff was a changed man, and a grave man too, during the remainder of that horrible retreat, on which so many of our brave soldiers perished of starvation and fatigue; and which Lord Wellington continued without delay, until the Ebro and the Douro were far in his rear; and his harassed army found winter quarters on the frontier of Portugal.
Father John Cameron lived to a good old age, and died Catholic Bishop of Edinburgh, where he now lies interred before the altar of St. Mary's Chapel.
X.
THE FOREST OF GAICH;
OR, THE CAPTAIN DHU.
After the Flemish campaign, under his Royal Highness the Duke of York, and the terrible retreat to Deventer—a retreat in which the sufferings of our troops rivalled those endured by the French after Moscow—the 42nd Highlanders were encamped during the spring of 1795 at Hanbury, in England, under the command of General Sir William Meadows, when their strength, which had been weakened by their recent operations against the French republican armies, was greatly augmented by volunteers from various Highland fencible corps, which had been raised in the preceding year. Among others, they were joined by the two entire flank companies of the Grant Fencibles, or old 97th Regiment, which had been raised to the number of thirteen hundred men by Sir James Grant of Grant, Bart, (locally known as the Good Sir James), almost entirely among his own name and clan in Strathspey, a district which has long been famous for its stirring music and the military spirit of its people. These volunteers, in the month of September, set out on their march through Badenoch to join the 42nd, under the command of Captain MacPherson of Ballychroan, who had been appointed to the corps, the colonel of which was then Major-General Sir Hector Munro, K.B.