The small remnant that was left, and was not butchered by Cumberland, fled to the West. Sometimes one could wish Prince Charles had died at Culloden! and yet one would not spare the wanderings, or Flora Macdonald. Thousands of the men fled to America; thousands of Scots in America to-day can say, "My great grandfather fought at Culloden." Hundreds of Scots to-day are sent "home" from America to be educated. I have met in the magnificent Highlands of Montana, Scotchmen, true Highlanders, who had been sent to Edinburgh university that they might be Scots, even though they carried "American" blood in their veins.
When Boswell and Johnson came here in 1773, twenty-seven years after the Forty Five, they found that many of the Highlanders were going to America, leaving the lairds and the land. One M'Queen of Glenmorison was about to go.
"Dr. Johnson said he wished M'Queen laird of Glenmorison, and the laird to go to America. M'Queen very generously answered he should be sorry for it; for the laird could not shift for himself in America as he could do."
Small wonder that Prince Charles, knowing of this exodus, and believing life still held for him its chances, its glories, away from Rome and even if he was fifty-five, looked longingly over the sea, in 1776, thinking that he might lead these rebellious colonists, so many of them of his rebellious people, and reëstablish the House of Stewart in the New World. Surely Burr, coming with Blennerhasset, thirty years after, had something of the Stewart in him.
The Orkneys
Scotland is divided by a deep geologic cleft. Glenmore, the Great Glen, runs southwesterly from Inverness to Fort William and Oban, cutting the country into two parts. One is Scotland; the other is the West, the Highlands and the Islands. One is known, the other unknown. One has been prosperous, royal, noble; the other has been wild, independent, chief and clans holding together. To-day, if the East is strangely quiet, the West is strangely silent.
In the East you know things have happened; remnants remain, ruined castles testify; in the West it is as though they had not happened, those far historic things; castles are heaps of blackened or crumbled stone; or, if they stand, they stand like prehistoric remnants, and the clachans are emptied; the Risings, the migrations, the evictions, the extensions of deer forests and sheep pastures and grouse preserves, the poverty, yes, and the wandering spirit of the people leading them ever afar—where always they are Scottish down to the last drop, always looking toward Home, but ever leaving it empty of their presence.
It is a stranger land, though so lovingly familiar, than any I have ever been in. I have been in valleys of the Rockies which were not so lonely as glens in Scotland. When Hood wrote his sonnet on "Silence," beginning
"There is a silence where hath been no sound,"
He went on to a correction—