8. "The MacGregors were protected by ridges of rock"
THE ADVENTURES OF ROB ROY.
CHAPTER I.
COLIN AND OINA.
The sun of a September evening—we need not say in what year—was shining down a wild and lonely glen, a few miles eastward from the head of Loch Lomond, where a boy and a girl sat on the slope of the green hill-side, watching a herd of fifteen red-eyed, small, and shaggy black cattle, with curly fronts and long sharp horns, that were browsing mid-leg deep amid the long-leaved fern. The place was one of stern and solemn grandeur.
Leaping from ledge to ledge, and foaming between the grey and time-worn rocks, a mountain torrent, red and fierce, swept down the steep slope of the narrow glen, now disappearing in deep corries, that were covered by dwarf birch, hazel, and alder trees, and elsewhere emerging in mist and spray, white as the thistle's beard, till it reached the lake which reposed under the shadows of the vast Ben Lomond, whose summits were hidden in grey mist.
Ben Lawers, which towers above the source of the Tay, and Ben More, that looks down on the Dochart with its floating isle, are there; but the king of these is Ben Lomond, a name which means in English "the hill of the lake full of isles," for four-and-twenty stud the loch below; and the bare scalp of that mighty mountain rises to the height of 3,300 feet above the water. There the wild winds that came in sudden gusts down the glens, furrowed up the bosom of the loch, causing its waters to ripple on the silent shore, and on its verdant isles, with a weird and solemn sound.
But here where our story opens, the shrill note of the curlew, as he suddenly sprang aloft from the thick soft heather, made one start; while the rush of the many white watercourses that poured over the whinstone rocks, and woke the silence, was sharp and hissing. The setting sun shed a flood of purple light along the steep-sided glen, making the heather seem absolutely crimson.
The boy and girl, Colin Bane, the son of a widow, and Oina MacAleister, belonged to the clachan, or village—the smoking chimneys of which alone indicated its locality—about three miles off; for the walls of the little cottages so closely resembled the grey rocks of the glen, and their roofs, thatched with heather, blended so nearly with the mountainside, that, except for the forty little columns of white vapour that ascended into the clear evening sky, there was nothing else to indicate a human habitation.
Neither of these young people was above twelve years old; but the boy was tall, lithe, and manly for his age. His dark grey eyes were keen and sharp as those of the wiry otter terrier that sat beside him; and his bare legs, which his tattered kilt revealed from the knee, showed that he was handsome as well as strong—so strong, that he was already entitled to wear a man's bonnet, as a proof that he could lift and fling the "stone of strength,"—the test of manhood, which lay beside the door of Rob Roy's house, as beside that of every Highland chieftain, to test the muscle of his growing followers; for previous to being able to poise and hurl the Clachneart, a boy wore his hair simply tied with a thong.