“I gave him your message, my lord.”
“What did he say then?”
The man hesitated.
“What did Campbell say?” again demanded the Earl.
“He said—eh—eh,” still hesitating—“he said he would see your Lordship——”
The rest of the sentence was lost in a cough and the skirl of Ogilvie’s pipes.
“It must be frankly admitted,” says Dr. Norman Macleod, “that there is no man more easily offended, more thin-skinned, who cherishes longer the memory of an insult, or keeps up with more freshness a personal, family, or party feud than the genuine Highlander. Woe to the man who offends his pride or vanity! ‘I may forgive, but I cannot forget,’ is a favourite saying. He will stand by a friend to the last; but let a breach be once made, and it is most difficult ever again to repair it as it once was. The grudge is immortal.” Here is a case in proof:—
A Highlander was visited on his death-bed by his clergyman, who exhorted Donald to prepare himself for another world by a sincere repentance of all the crimes he had committed on earth, and strongly urged the absolute necessity of forgiving his enemies.
Donald shrugged up his shoulders at this hard request; yet he at last agreed to forgive every person who had injured him except one, who had long been the Highlander’s mortal foe, and of whom Donald hoped the parson, knowing all the circumstances of the case, would make an exception. The holy man, however, insisted so much on this point, that Donald at last said—