LAURA EVERINGHAM;

OR,

THE HIGHLANDERS OF GLEN ORA.

BY

JAMES GRANT,

AUTHOR OF "THE ROMANCE OF WAR," "THE AIDE-DE-CAMP,"
ETC. ETC.

"Ruin's wheel has driven o'er us,
Not a hope dare now attend;
The world wide is all before us,
But a world without a friend!"
Strathallan's Lament.

LONDON:
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS,
THE BROADWAY, LUDGATE.
NEW YORK: 416, BROOME STREET.

LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

CONTENTS.

CHAP.

I. [The Foster Brothers]
II. [The Feudal Lords of the Nineteenth Century]
III. [Mr. Ephraim Snaggs]
IV. [The Rock of the Boar]
V. [Callum Dhu]
VI. [Which Treats of many Things]
VII. [The Rent Court]
VIII. [Minnie]
IX. [The Red Priest of Applecross]
X. [The Stone of the Sun]
XI. [My Mother]
XII. [The Gathering]
XIII. [The Stone of Strength]
XIV. [The Seven Bullets]
XV. [The Sixth Day]
XVI. [Sir Horace]
XVII. [Mr. Snobleigh]
XVIII. [Death!]
XIX. [The Eviction]
XX. [Desolation]
XXI. [The Heather on Fire!]
XXII. [The Uisc Dhu]
XXIII. [The Ruined Cottage]
XXIV. [The White Stag]
XXV. [The Gael and the Saxon]
XXVI. [A Last Interview]
XXVII. [Dumbarton]
XXVIII. [My Regiment]
XXIX. [The Route—We Sail]
XXX. [The Troop Ship]
XXXI. [The Reefs of Palegrossa]
XXXII. [The Yuze Bashi]
XXXIII. [The Khan]
XXXIV. [Story of the Greek Lieutenant]
XXXV. [The Execution]
XXXVI. [In Orders for Duty]
XXXVII. [I March To Rodosdchigg]
XXXVIII. [The Vision of Corporal Moustapha]
XXXIX. [The Turkish Veil]
XL. [A Love Adventure]
XLI. [A Strange Task]
XLII. [Two Charming Eyes]
XLIII. [I Scale the Window]
XLIV. [Temptation and Folly]
XLV. [Story of the Wise King and the Wicked Geni]
XLVI. [Hussein's Wrath]
XLVII. [Sequel to Chapter Forty-Three]
XLVIII. [The Turkish Boat]
XLIX. [The Bagnio]
L. [The Two Turkish Lieutenants]
LI. [Dreams and Longings]
LII. [The Galiondoi]
LIII. [A Row in the Bagnio]
LIV. [Flight]
LV. [Resume my Command]
LVI. [Biodh Treun!]
LVII. [The Isle of Marmora]
LVIII. [The Fairy Bell]
LIX. [A Gleam of other Days]
LX. [Farewell]

THE HIGHLANDERS OF GLEN ORA.

CHAPTER I.
THE FOSTER-BROTHERS.

It was after sunset in the month of April three years ago.

The hills of the Western Highlands were still tipped with a golden gleam, but the deep and savage hollows of Glen Ora were gloomy and full of dark shadows. Still crowned with the snow of last winter, above it towered Ben Ora, beneath whose mighty scalp the giant peaks of the north and west were dwindled down to little hills; for among those stupendous mountains the eye becomes so accustomed to their colossal proportions, that all just ideas of size and distance are lost. At its base spread one of those vast tracts of brown or purple heath so common in the Scottish Highlands, overspread by a wilderness of stones, and torn by ghastly ravines from which the mist of downward torrents rose. The sides of these were tufted by those black whin bushes, the introduction of which tradition ascribes to the hunting Stuarts, as a cover for their game.

On the western shoulder of Ben Ora, a ridge of riven and naked rocks, resembling the skeleton of a mountain range, stood a herd of deer, with all their proud antlers visible against the clear bright flush of the sunset sky.

Two men were observing them from the rugged bank of one of the watercourses, in which they were half hidden. One carried a fishing-rod, and the other a gun.

He with the rod was a tall, stout, and well-made lad of some twenty years, with dark-blue eyes, curly brown hair, and a sunburnt visage; he wore a grey shooting-jacket and kilt, a sporran, of badger-skin, and a heather-coloured bonnet. His companion was a few years older, larger in form, brawny, thickset, and strong as a Highland bull, and his knees, where shown by his tattered kilt and well-worn hose, of no colour known in nature, were almost as hairy as those of the same animal. He wore the usual coarse blue jacket and bonnet of a Highland peasant.

His hair, beard, and whiskers, which grew all matted in a curly mass, were black, almost to that deep tint which seems blue when touched by the light; his eyes were dark, restless, keen, and sparkling; his nose somewhat short and saucy, but his face, which was browned to the hue of mahogany by exposure to the weather, was thoughtful, stern, anxious, and at times even haggard in expression. Save his gun and skene-dhu, he had no weapon, though his aspect and bearing were rough and wild as those of any Celtic bandit we have read of in romance; but then his figure was a model of manly beauty, symmetry, and grace.

The first personage with the red was Allan Mac Innon, MYSELF, and the dark and handsome man was my foster-brother—-my co-dhalta—Black Mac Ian—usually named by us Callum Dhu, and on this eventful evening we were observing a party of five English tourists or visitors, who were somewhat rashly (as they were without a guide) urging their shaggy shelties up the side of Ben Ora, to obtain a view of the scenery by moonlight.

This party consisted of two fair and laughing English girls, wearing broad brown straw hats; and three gentlemen clad in those peculiar coats and tartan caps, without which no Sassenach deems himself eligible to pass the Highland frontier.

'Callum,' said I, 'shall I net warn them to beware?'

'It would ill become your father's son to run after their tails, like a keeper or gilly,' said he, grasping my arm angrily, as we spoke in Gaelic, to give the original of which would fidget my friend the printer.

'Callum, they are not more than half-a-mile off now.'

'Oh, what a pity it is, that the half-mile was not a thousand, ay, or ten thousand! The fires that may be extinguished this summer on many a hearth in Glen Ora would burn all the brighter perhaps in winter.'

'Not in the least, Callum; for if we had not one truculent tyrant over us,' said I, 'we would be certain to have another.'

'Aich ay; for the Mac Innons of Glen Ora are doomed men! and—'

'See, see,' I exclaimed, 'they have almost reached the Craig-na-tuirc, and if they attempt to descend after nightfall, something terrible will happen.'

'Let it happen: if it is their fate, can we avert it?' said Callum, with a dark scowl in his eyes which sparkled in the last flush of the west; 'what matter is it to you, Allan Mac Innon? Has not this man—this Horace Everingham, Baronet, and so forth, who bought the fair patrimony your father's brother wasted in all manner of riotous living—told you coldly, when begging a six months' mercy for your sick mother, and for the two-and-thirty poor families in the glen, that he intrusted all such petty affairs to his factor, (that mangy Lowland cur, Ephraim Snaggs, with his Bible phrases and pious quotations,) and what said he? That the new proprietor had resolved to turn the glen into a deer forest—-a hunting field—and that whether the rents were forthcoming or not, the people must go! That Canada was a fine place for such as they, and that hampers of foreign game would soon replace them. The curse of heaven be on his foreign game, say I! When the Queen wants men to recruit the ranks of the Black Watch, of the Gordon Highlanders, and the Ross-shire Buffs, will she borrow the contents of the Lowlander's hamper? Let these moonlight visitors go over the rocks if they will—let Loch Ora receive their bodies and the devil their souls, for what matters it to you, Mac Innon, or to me?'

'True, true,' said I, bitterly, 'but there are two ladies with them—Laura, the daughter of Sir Horace, and her friend.'

'They, at least, are kind to the poor people, and gave many a pound to the women of Glentuirc, when they were expatriated last year; yet evil comes over every stranger who crosses Ben Ora.'

'A spirit is said to haunt it,' said I.

'Would to heaven a spirit haunted the glen, and kept out all but those whose right comes not from paper or from parchment—but from the hand of God!'

'But the women, Callum?'

'Co-dhalta, be not a soft-hearted fool,' was the pettish response; 'who cared for our women, when the sheriff, Mac Fee, with his police and soldiers, came here and tore down the huts, and fired through the thatch to force the people out? Who cared for old bedridden Aileen Mac Donuil, whose four sons died with eight hundred of our Cameronians in India, and who was shot through the body, and died miserably on the wet hill side three days after? And so, forth were they all driven to the shore by the baton and bayonet—the old and the young, the strong man and the infant, the aged, the frail, and the women almost in labour—to be crammed on board the great ship, the Duchess, and taken to America, like slaves from Africa, and why? Because the land that gave corn and potatoes to the people was wanted to fatten the grouse and red deer, and thus were they driven forth from their fathers' holdings, their fathers' homes and graves; so Allan, believe me, your sympathy for the strangers who are now on the hill, is all moonshine in the water. Ha! ha! something always happens to those who go up Ben Ora after nightfall. You remember the story of Alaster Grant, the Captain Dhu, or Black Alexander from Urquhart? He was a frightfully immoral character, savage and fierce, and was said to have done dreadful things in the Indian wars, fighting, plundering, and sparing neither man, woman, nor child. Well, this dissolute soldier was shooting with some of his wild companions from Fort William, about a year after Waterloo. They spent a night on Ben Ora, and all that night the lightning played about its scalp. Next morning a shepherd—old Alisdair Mac Gouran—found their hut torn to pieces; the whole party, to all appearance, strangled, their gun-barrels twisted like corkscrews, and the Black Captain's body torn limb from limb, and strewed all around; but whether by a thunderbolt or the devil, no man knew, though many averred it must have been the latter. Six months ago, I watched an Englishman or a Lowlander, (which, I neither know nor care,) go up the Craig-na-tuirc, and he never more came down; but three months after, his bones, or little more, were found at the mouth of the Uisc Dhu, with his travelling knapsack and sketch-book close by; for six long miles the Lammas floods had swept them from the spot where he must have perished. Two others went up in October, and in ascending the mountain were singing merrily; but the snow came down that night, and hid the path; the cold was bitter, and the deer were driven down to the clachan in the glen. Next day we found the strangers stiff enough, and piled a cairn to mark the spot. I warned another traveller, a Scotsman too, from the Braes of Angus, against ascending the Ben alone! He, too, went up laughing, and came down no more. A week or two after I was standing on the brow of the Craig-na-tuirc, and saw a gathering of the ravens in the corrie below. I heard their exulting croak, and the flap of their dusky wings; and there, in the moss of the wet ravine, we found the traveller's body wedged up to the neck, and his bare skull divested of eyes, nose, and hair, picked white and clean by these birds of evil omen. Then we all know the story of the keeper that was gored by the white stag, on the night your father died.'

'All this I know well enough,' said I, 'and hence my anxiety for the two ladies, who are now in the dusk, ascending that dangerous precipice.'

'Who pities our women—yet they are starving?'

'God pities them.'

'He alone!' responded Callum, lifting his tattered bonnet at the name; 'yet my poor mother died in my arms of sheer hunger, and Snaggs, the factor, mocked me at her funeral, because I had a piper who played the march of Gil Chriosd before her coffin; but I heard him with scorn, for I knew that my mother—she who nursed you, Allan Mac Innon, had now that inheritance of which not even her Grace of Sutherland, or the great Lord of Breadalbane, can deprive the poor Highlander—a grave on the mountain side, and a home among the angels in heaven.'

The words of my foster-brother raised a momentary glow of indignation in my breast; and turning away from the mountain, we began to descend into the glen in the twilight, and I strove to think no more about the strangers or their fate, but in vain, for Laura Everingham, with all her pretty winning ways, was still before me, and her voice was in my ear.

We had met repeatedly in our mutual rides, rambles, and wanderings, and the impression she made upon me, when acting as her guide to the old ruined chapels, towers, and burial-places, the high cascades, and deep corries of the Ora, and other solemn scenes of nature, with which our district abounded, was lasting, pure, and deep. I was learning to love her, more dearly than I dared to tell, for poverty—crushing, grinding poverty—like a mountain weighed upon my heart and tongue; yet Laura knew my secret—at least I hoped so; pure devotion and true tenderness cannot remain long concealed; a woman soon discovers them by a mysterious intuition, and as Laura (knowing this) neither repulsed nor shunned me, was I not justified in believing myself not altogether indifferent to her?

Time will tell. 'Happy age,' says some Italian writer, 'when a look, the rustle of a garment—a flower—a mere nothing, suffice to make the youthful heart overflow with torrents of joy!'

The severity of Sir Horace, and the pride, petulance, and hostility of my mother, of whom more in good time, had partly estranged us of late; but Laura had repeatedly said,

'If I knew your mother, Allan, I am sure she would learn to love me.'

'I know not, Miss Everingham, how any one could help loving you!' was my reply, and I trembled at my own temerity.

One word more for Callum Dhu, and he and my reader must be acquainted for life.

His grandfather was that noble and heroic Mac Ian, who, after the defeat of Prince Charles, watched over him with matchless fidelity for weeks, concealing him in the mountains at the risk of his life, and robbing for his support while his own children were starving, and though he knew that 30,000l. were set upon the head of the royal fugitive. This poor man was afterwards, when in extreme old age, hanged at Inverness, for 'lifting' a sheep; but, though impelled by hunger to borrow subsistence from the folds of the wealthy, he had scrupulously avoided the possessions of the poor; and before death, took off his bonnet, to 'thank the blessed God that he had never betrayed his trust, never injured the poor, nor refused to share his crust with the stranger, the needy, or the fatherless.'

This poor sheepstealer died like a Christian and a hero, and had in youth been one of those Highland warriors whose more than Spartan faith and truth a late pitiful historian has dared to stigmatize as mere ignorance of the value of gold. Under the same circumstances, we presume, this Scottish writer would have known to a penny the value set upon the head of his fugitive guest.

With his blood and spirit, Callum Dhu had inherited many of the wild ideas and primitive Celtic virtues of his ancestor, as the reader will see when they become better acquainted.

CHAPTER II.
THE FEUDAL LORDS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Turning our steps homeward, after a day of wandering and fishing, we traversed the Braes of Glen Ora, a wild and desolate scene, such as Horatio Mac Culloch would love to paint, tufted by broom and whin; torn by savage watercourses, all yellow marl and gravel, swept by the foaming torrent, or jagged by ghastly rocks, silence on every hand, and a deep shadow over all, save where a golden gleam of light that shot between the black and distant peaks of the west, tipped the points of the purple heather with fire, and edged the scattered rocks with the last glow of the sun that had set.

Here and there, throughout this desolate tract, on which the shadows of night were descending, were blacker spots, that marked where, in the preceding year, the houses of nearly fifty crofters had been levelled or burned. No tongue was required to tell us the terrible story of legal wrong, and worse than feudal tyranny inflicted on the unresisting poor. The blackened rafters were lying on every hand among the long grass, and thrown far asunder; the humble walls were half levelled and overgrown by weeds, like the hearths around which generations had sat, and told or sung of the past memories of the Gael and the kindly chiefs of other times, in the long nights of winter, when Ben Ora was mantled by snow, and the frozen cascade hung over the rocks, white as the beard of Ossian. Here a currant-bush, or there an apple-tree, still marked amid the weeds and heather where the garden of the peasant had been. Elsewhere the glen was yet dotted by little patches of corn and potatoes, all growing wild; but where were those who had sown and planted them?

Driven from their native land to make way for sheep, or grouse, or deer, and packed in ships, like slaves for the Cuban market, the old people of the glen, the women and children, were pining on the banks of the Susquehanna; while the young and able were forced by starvation, or lured by false promises, into the ranks of the Sutherland Highlanders, and were now away to fight the Russians in the East. Thus it is that the game-laws, centralization, wilful neglect, and maladministration, reduce the people of the glens to misery, starvation, and inability to pay the exorbitant rents demanded for their little farms; then their dwellings are demolished, and themselves expelled, that one vast game preserve may be made of the land which has given to the British service nearly ninety of its finest battalions of infantry.

"Clanchattan is broken, the Seaforth bends low,
The sun of Clan Ronald is sinking in labour,
Glencoe and Clan Donoquhy, what are they now?
And where is bold Keppoch, the Lord of Lochaber?
All gone with the House they supported, laid low!
While the Dogs of the South their bold life-blood were lapping,
Trod down by a fierce and a merciless foe;
The brave are all gone, with the Stuarts of Appin!"

'My God!' exclaimed Callum, with deep emotion, as he looked around him, with a fierce and saddened eye, 'who now could think this place had given three hundred swordsmen to Glenfinnon?'

'And sent two hundred with my father to Egypt?' added I.

'Better had he and they stayed at home; for the Mac Innons might yet have brooked the land their fathers sprang from.'

Callum Dhu felt, as he spoke, like a true Celt—believing that our ancestors sprang from the soil; i.e. were the old and original race, without predecessors.

My father, the youngest of the two sons of Alaster Mac Innon, of Glen Ora, was an officer of the 42nd Highlanders, who served under Abercromby in Egypt and Wellington in Spain. His elder brother belonged, unfortunately, to the Scots Fusilier Guards, and amid the dissipation of a London life, 'in rivalling the follies of his equals in birth and superiors in fortune,' soon wasted his small but ancient patrimony, which, though it could once bring 600 swordsmen to the king's host, in more modern times did not produce more than 600l. yearly rent.

Glen Ora was not entailed, thus its broad acres of heather and whinstone-rock, mountain and torrent, slipped from under the hands of my gay uncle like a moving panorama; he died early, and the estate passed away to strangers. The old tower was demolished, and a hunting-seat built on its site, by a noble duke, whose family had enriched their pockets, if not their blood, by intermarriage with the tribe of Levi. Then began the war of extermination and expatriation in the north; and while the authoress of "Uncle Tom" was feasted and slavery reviled in the coteries of the Duchess in London, fire, sword, and eviction were enforced by Mr. Snaggs, her factor, in Glen Ora. Thus had things continued until the preceding year, when the estate was purchased by Sir Horace Everingham, of Elton Hall, Yorkshire.

My father had died on service with his regiment in Jamaica, when the yellow flag waved on Up-park Camp, and the Highland bonnets lay as thick in the yard of the pest-stricken barracks as ever they have been on the battle-field; and my mother, a Stuart, of Appin, brought me home to Glen Ora, where, with the pension of a captain's widow, she endeavoured to eke out a subsistence among our own people, and occupied as a farm, at a small rental, the thatched mansion, which in better times was the jointure-house of our family.

But a ukase had gone forth! The whole country was doomed to become a deer-forest, desolate and wild as when the first Fergus and his bare-kneed Scots landed on its shores, which perhaps no foot had trod since the waters of the Flood had left them.

The men of Glentuirc, a sept of our race, had already been swept away, and now those of Glen Ora were to follow.

As a necessary preliminary the rents had been doubled and trebled, until we were incapable of satisfying the rapacity of this alien lord, whose feudal charters gave him a more than imperial power over us. A blight had fallen on our little corn-patches; several of our sheep had been smothered in the snow, and other troubles and difficulties fell thick and fast upon us. In vain Ephraim Snaggs, the factor, was prayed for mercy; but to seek it from that astute writer to the signet and grim elder of the kirk, was 'to take a bone from a tiger.'

The olden times were gone! For ages unnumbered the Highland landlord deemed that wealth consisted in the number of families, and troops of chubby children who lived upon his lands; farms were divided and subdivided in the fertile glens, until 'every rood of land maintained its man;' and on every lot and rood was a tenant—a hardy soldier, a tiller of the soil, and the father of a sturdy and a faithful race. The laird valued his property not by the rent-roll, but by the number of brave and leal-hearted swordsmen whose homes were made thereon. This was the patriarchal system, old as the world before the Flood; for feudality, with its barbarism, its imaginary rights and slavish tenures, its monkish parchments and legal villany, was unknown in the Highlands until a comparatively recent period; and then, noble was the struggle made against it by the Wallace of the Celtic tribes, John of Moidart, who expelled and slew his nephew Ronald Galda, for accepting from James V. a feudal charter of the lands which belonged to the tribe of which he, Ronald, was the chief. In this spirit, the Highland peasant has a hereditary right to his hut—a right derived from God—but kings have given our feudal lords, even in the nineteenth century, a power over the land on which the hut is built; and at their behest whole villages are demolished, and the people swept away with a heartless barbarity sufficient to call down the lasting vengeance of heaven on the ignoble dukes and canting marquises of the northern and western Highlands!

But to resume:—

After traversing this Serbonian waste for a mile or two, we reached a little cot built under the brow of a rock; large blocks of whinstone, with a few courses of turf above them, bedded in clay, formed the walls; the roof, which was composed of divot, fern, and straw, all firmly tied by ropes of heather, was covered by moss of the richest emerald green. It was a humble dwelling, with a little window of one pane, on each side of a rude door composed of three planks nailed on bars; yet Callum Dhu, who had lived here alone since his mother's death, never closed it at meal-time, without coming forth to the road, in the hospitable old Celtic spirit, to see if a stranger or wayfarer were in sight.

Here we parted, as I resisted all his kind invitations to enter, though the poor fellow had but little to offer me; nor would I permit him to escort me home, as he was weary after a long day of wandering. Callum Mac Ian, the descendant of our hereditary henchman, now supported himself by killing foxes, weasels, and wild cats; for which, as these vermin were very destructive, (especially the former among the sheep,) he received a small sum from each cot-farmer in Glen Ora. This contribution, with a little patch of potatoes, cultivated by himself, enabled him to live; but as Callum occasionally took a shot at other quadrupeds which were not considered vermin, he was continually in scrapes and broils with the keepers of the duke, the marquis, the laird, and other adjoining potentates, whose ancestors, by force or fraud, had partitioned the land of the Mac Innons, as the powers of Europe did Poland.

'My love to dear Minnie,' said he, touching his bonnet in the dark, as I left him; 'I would she were here with me, for the cottage is dreary since my poor mother went to the place of sleep on the hill; but achial, Mac Innon! this is not a time in Glen Ora for marrying or giving in marriage.'

Minnie was my mother's maid, and the object of my foster-brother's boyish attachment. They had long loved each other, and had solemnly plighted their troth by joining hands through the hole of the Clach-na-Greiné; but Snaggs was their evil genius; for with the daily dread of eviction and proscription hanging over him, how could Callum pay the illegally-levied marriage-tax of forty shillings, or bring a wife under the caber of his hut, or ask leave to add one foot in breadth to his little patch of potatoes and kail?

In a few minutes after, I stood at my mother's door.

CHAPTER III.
MR. EPHRAIM SNAGGS.

Our residence, the old jointure-house, now shorn of its fair proportions, and diminished in aspect, since it was built for the widow of Lachlan Mohr Mac Innon, who led his clan to Worcester, was small, low in the roof, and heavily thatched with warm heather. The two principal rooms were wainscoted; the entrance was floored with hard-beaten clay, and above the door was a rudely-carved representation of the arms of Mac Innon, a boar's head erased, holding in its mouth the legbone of a deer, supported by a lion and, a leopard. This uncouth piece of heraldry, the pride of my mother's heart, was the chef d'oeuvre of some local sculptor. The aspect of the house was cheerless and indicative of the decay that had fallen upon us; the carpets were faded and worn; the furniture antique and rickety; there were corner cupboards, where old china, worm-eaten books, bottles of whisky, powder-flasks, bullet-moulds, deer-horns, fishing-gear, teapots, and coffee-cups, dogs' collars, an old dirk and skene, mingled pell-mell with innumerable other etcetera.

Far off on the mountain slope, the strong square tower of Lachlan Mohr (who was besieged therein by the Campbells after Inverlochy) was a landmark for two hundred years; but now it was removed to make way for a modern mansion, the windows of which, on this evening, were brilliantly lighted up; and then, I doubted not, Sir Horace Everingham was sitting down to a sumptuous entertainment after his visit to Ben Ora, while I, the heir of all these hills and glens, had scarcely a crust to place before me.

I thought of all these things—the present and the past—with a bitterness renewed by the recent conversation with my foster-brother. I tossed aside my fishing-gear, basket, and bonnet, and with a sigh of weariness and dejection, entered the half-dilapidated mansion. As I had been abroad the whole day, I sought, with some anxiety, the apartment of my sick and aged mother. I heard the sound of voices proceeding from it; she was expostulating, and a stranger was threatening! I made a forward stride, when a hand was timidly laid on my arm; I turned, and met the anxious face of pretty Minnie Mac Omish.

'A chial! a chial!' she whispered, with tears in her soft hazel eyes; 'Snaggs, the factor, is with your mother, Allan, and I fear he brings bad news.'

'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?'

'What have you dared to say, Mr. Snaggs?' I asked, turning sharply to that personage; 'why do I find my mother in tears?'

'Because she is out of cash,' was the cool reply; 'a simple reason, my dear sir, and a plain one; but it is very little that you do to furnish her with any. I have called for the last time anent the arrears of rent due to Sir Horace Everingham—the new proprietor of this estate—arrears due before he acquired the lands, and I receive still the same unvaried excuses, about sheep with the rot, cattle with the murrain, or scraps of traditions and antediluvian nonsense, about the time when Loch Ora belonged to the Mac Innons—and about your great-grandfather who fought at Culloden, and was nearly hanged at Carlisle, as, I think, he deserved to be, for opposing the House of Hanover, and the Kirk as established by law. Now the law, of which I am an unworthy representative—the law says, young man, that when a tenant—but I need not quote the cases before the Lords of Council and Session in 1792 or 1756 on this point, to you. If an instalment at least, of the aforesaid arrears—say about fifty pounds—is not paid to me—to me, sir,' he continued, laying a fat finger impressively into the palm of his left hand, 'then a notice of eviction shall be duly served upon you, with the rest of the lazy wretches in Glen Ora, who must all sail for Canada this summer, sure as my name is Ephraim Snaggs. Moreover, sir, I may inform you, that Sir Horace, by my recommendation—mine, sir—has some intentions of pulling down this absurd-looking old house, and erecting here a box for his friend, Captain Clavering, or for Mr. Snobleigh, of Snobleigh Park, I know not which; and if so, the law must be put in force against you, sir—the law of expulsion—you hear me!'

The reader may imagine the pride, wrath, and bitterness that swelled up within me, at this insolent speech, which had gradually approached the bullying point. I made a stride towards Snaggs, and my fingers twitched with an irresistible desire to grasp his throat.

My mother (poor old woman!) had long been in ill health. Mhari Mac Innon the 'wise woman' of our locality, and other aged people of the glen, alleged her illness was caused by her declining to drink of St. Colme's well, a famous medicinal spring in Glen Ora, where, for ages, the Mac Innons and adjacent tribes had been wont to quaff the water at midnight, as a sovereign remedy for all diseases; and thereafter drop in a coin, or tie a rag to the alders which overshadowed it, as an offering to the guardian spirit of the fountain. Pale, sad, and sickly, my mother sat in her high-backed chair, motionless and silent as if overwhelmed by the approaching tide of ruin, in the form of debt which we had not a shilling to meet—and of avarice which we could not satisfy.

'Mr. Snaggs,' said I, 'you should have reserved your detestable communications for my ears alone, and thus spared my poor mother the humiliation of a moment so bitter as this. She is old, and her thoughts and ideas have come down to her from other times. She cannot see, nor believe, that any man has authority to turn her off the land of the Mac Innons—'

'Pooh, my dear sir,' said Snaggs, waving his hand, and rising; 'if you are about to begin your old-world nonsense and twaddle about Celtic right in the soil, I must leave you. The sheriff's warrants will tell another story next week, if fifty pounds at least—'

'Listen to me, Ephraim Snaggs,' said I, forcing him into a seat, and grasping his shoulder like a vice. 'I am here on the land that belonged to my forefathers—to Angus Mac Innon, who fought for King James at Culloden—'

'Ha-ha—stuff—there you go again!'

'There was a time,' I continued, fiercely, 'when had you, or such as you, spoken above your breath in Glen Ora, you had been flung into the loch with a hundred weight of stone at your neck. There was a time when the Mac Innons owned all the land we may see from Ben Ora; when we had Griban in Mull, the Isles of Tiree, of Pabay, and Scalpa, with Strathardle in Skye. Poor as we are now, we owned all that, but only in common—mark me, sir, in common, with the people of our name. Listen to me, Mr. Snaggs,' I continued, as the fierce sob of pride, so difficult to repress, rose to my throat; 'I am the last of a long line, whose misfortune it has been to fight for the losing side. Our people marched to Worcester under Lachlan M'hor, and perished there in heaps; we were at Sheriffmuir, under the banner of the Marquis of Seaforth, for a marquis he was, by order of the king; we were "out" in the '45, under Angus Mac Innon, and of all the swordsmen he marched from yonder glen, which you are about to depopulate, not a man came back from Culloden—as God hears me—not one. Since then our people have gone forth in the Highland regiments to every part of the world. Some have left their bones on the heights of Abraham and in the isles of the Western Indies; some sleep under the shadow of the Pyramids and on the plains of the Peninsula. In India, Egypt, Africa, and Spain, wherever Britain wanted men to fight her battles, there have they been faithful and true, loyal and brave, standing foremost in the ranks of war, and giving place to none! All my own family have perished in the service of their country since this century began—I am the last of them, and as their reward, our roof is to be torn from us, and we are to be expelled from the home and the graves of our kindred—we, the descendants of the old aboriginal race, who first trod the land after God separated it from the waters, and why? because a miserable fifty pounds may not be forthcoming by a certain day! There was a time, Mr. Ephraim Snaggs, when the cry of Bas Alpin from yonder rock would easily have brought six hundred swordsmen to guard the roof you threaten; and he whom you beard—he, who from the first Mac Innon, has come through twenty generations in the right line.'

'Had you come through twenty generations in the wrong line I would have respected you quite as much, sir,' said Mr. Snaggs, with his bland professional sneer, as he rose again, and smoothed the nap of his hat, preparatory to retiring, as if wearied by the torrent of Gaelic I had poured upon him. 'All these fine arguments about broadswords and barbarism won't pay the rent or satisfy the just claims of Sir Horace, thus the law of landlord and tenant must take its course. You have no means of raising money, I suppose?'

'None!'

'No friends—eh?'

'None.'

'Nothing you can sell?'

'Nothing!'

'Then, take my advice, and quietly quit the glen altogether; there are plenty of counting-rooms, offices, and shops in the Lowlands, where such great sturdy fellows as you may easily make yearly, triple the rent of this old tumble-down place, with its patch of potatoes and corn. Quit your gun and fishing-rod—betake yourself to some honest and industrious occupation, instead of indulging in the very sophistry of vanity, and in wandering about these hills the livelong day, sighing over an imaginary past and an impossible future. No man has any right in the soil but such as the law gives him. Why, Mr. Allan, before I was half your age, I was one of the smartest writer's clerks in Glasgow, earning my threepence a page of a hundred and twenty-five words; but perhaps you would prefer a shopman's place—'

The shout with which Rob Roy greeted honest Bailie Jarvie's proposal to take his two sons as apprentices, was nothing to the shrill cry of anger with which my mother interrupted the sneer I was too poor to resent with pride—besides in its soundness, the advice of Snaggs humbled, while it exasperated me.

'I would rather see my boy Allan buried in his grave at the Stones of St. Colme than truckling to a Lowland dog like you, Ephraim Snaggs! Begone, lest I smite you on the face, weak though my hand, for recommending a calling so vile to Mac Innon of Glen Ora!'

'Mother, mother!' I exclaimed, 'what can I do?'

'Shoulder a musket and march to fight the Russians, if God opens up no brighter or better path to the son of a line that led their hundreds to battle in the times of old!' was the fierce and Spartan response.

'Very well, ma'am—very well,' continued the matter-of-fact Snaggs, smoothing the nap of his beaver, and smiling with his ticket-of-leave look. '"The gentle mind," saith the divine Blair, "is like the smooth stream, which reflects every object in its just proportion and in its fairest colours;" but these outbursts of anger, in the style of Helen Mac Gregor or Lady Macbeth, won't satisfy Sir Horace Everingham; and if the sum of fifty pounds, at least, be not forthcoming——'

A tremendous knocking at the outer door, and the sound of voices in great agitation, arrested the factor's angry farewell. Minnie grew pale, and hurried to open, and hastening into the passage, I met two of the Englishmen and the ladies, with disorder apparent in their attire and alarm in their faces. The oldest of their party, Sir Horace, was absent; and now the danger of the mountain, and the warnings withheld by Callum Dhu, rushed reproachfully on my memory.

'My father, Mr. Mac Innon—my father, Mr. Snaggs!' exclaimed Miss Everingham, rushing towards us, with clasped hands. 'I seek succour for my father!' she continued, trembling, agitated, pale, and in tears, and with hair and dress disordered.

'How—your father—Sir Horace?'

'We missed him at the rock, Mr. Snaggs, on Ben Ora—the steep rock, I know not how you name it!'

'The Craig-na-tuirc,' said I.

'Yes—thank you—yes; and he did not come back to us.'

'Some dreadful event must have occurred,' added her dark-eyed companion, Miss Clavering, whose usual bloom was blanched and gone; 'so many accidents—'

'Get us some aid, my good man,' said her brother, a tall and soldier-like fellow, with a heavy black moustache and a dragoon air; 'ropes, poles, and a couple of stable-lanterns, if you have such things. We must make a search after the old gentleman—come Snobleigh, my boy, look sharp!'

'Oh-aw-yaas,' drawled his companion, who had a very used-up air, and wore a short-tailed tartan shooting-jacket, an eye-glass, a cigar in his mouth, and a faint moustache under his snub nose; 'young fellow, eh-aw-aw, what is your name?'

'Glen Ora,' said my mother, interrupting me, and half springing from her chair, irate at his nonchalance.

'Aw—odd—very, Mr. Glen Ora; you'll look aftaw the ladies, whom we shall leave here in your chawge.'

'I am master here, at least,' said I, haughtily; 'Snaggs, hand chairs—see to the ladies, while I go to the Craig-na-tuirc, to search for Sir Horace.'

'Oh thank you—bless you!' exclaimed Miss Everingham, grasping my arm; 'all my trust is in you, Allan.'

'Lanterns—eh, aw-aw, you'll require—'

'The moon is up, and we require no other light,' said I, cutting short this mouthing drawler; 'come, Callum Mac Ian,' I added, as that personage, whose solitary hut the alarm had reached, appeared among us; 'old Sir Horace has fallen over the Craig-na-tuirc, or lost his way on the hills—let us seek him.'

Though weak and tottering, my mother had propped herself upon her cane, and risen to her full height, which was tall and commanding, to welcome those agitated and unceremonious visitors.

'Mr. Snaggs,' said she, pointing to the door, with the air of a Siddons, 'you may retire.'

Snaggs bowed with a malevolent smile, and withdrew.

'Ladies, be seated—gentlemen, assist the ladies to seats—thank you; be composed, Miss Everingham, and be assured that we will leave nothing undone to discover your father, who must have lost his way on the mountains. They were not made for Lowland legs to climb,' she added, with a cold smile.

Her stature, her lofty air, and calm decisive manner, awed the two English girls, and calmed their excessive agitation, while it dashed the somewhat brusque air of the gentlemen; and, reseating herself in her wide, old-fashioned chair, she spread her skirt all over it, in a way peculiar to ladies of 'the old school,' and then fixed her keen grey Highland eyes upon her unexpected and not over-welcome visitors, to learn the cause of all this commotion and alarm for one towards whom it may easily be supposed she felt but little love, as she deemed poor Sir Horace little better than a usurper, and was wont to stigmatize him roughly in Gaelic as 'a Hanoverian rat.'

I snatched a hunting-horn, Callum threw off his plaid, and leaving the two perfumed gentlemen to follow us as they best could in their well-glazed boots and tightly-strapped pantaloons, we took our way with all speed towards the rocky summit of Ben Ora.

CHAPTER IV
THE BOOK OF THE BOAR.

The sudden presence of Laura Everingham under my mother's roof had, for a moment, confused and astonished me, filling me with tremulous anxiety for the issue of their interview.

Laura was a lady-like girl, pretty rather than beautiful, and graceful rather than dignified, with a bright sunny English eye, a pale but interesting face, matchless hands and ankles, and a profusion of chestnut hair. She had trembled excessively when I presented her to my mother, whom she informed, as rapidly and coherently as her excessive agitation would permit, that Sir Horace, 'her dear, good, kind papa, would go to the summit of the mountain in the moonlight, in spite of all advice and the warnings of various shepherds.'

'The old gentlemen is, aw—aw, rather nocturnal in his tastes, madam,' yawned Mr. Snobleigh, who had been surveying the dining-room through his glass, with great apparent curiosity and much unmistakable depreciation; 'town habits, madam, won't suit this parallel—aw, of north latitude.'

'And he would visit the Craig-na-tuirc,' continued Laura; 'for dear papa is such an obstinate old thing, and we are always so afraid of the gout flying to his head, that we never dare to cross him. Well, we ascended that horrid mountain, and after great danger and labour reached the shoulder or cliff, Craig-na-tuirc, I think, you name it, just in time to see the moon rise above the hills, and a lovely moon it was—'

'Aw—for Scotland—very!' said Mr. Snobleigh.

'We were at the very verge of the precipice, with our little ponies, from which we had all dismounted, but dear old obstinate papa, who would keep his saddle, when suddenly an eagle soared up, with its huge flapping wings, from amid our feet—our wild ponies took to flight—scampered down the mountain, and vanished; that which bore papa accompanied them; we heard him crying piteously for help—oh, heaven, how piteously! And then, a white stag shot past—'

'God and Mary!—a white stag?' exclaimed my mother.

'Then all became still, so frightfully still, that I heard only my own heart beating. Oh, dear madam,' added Laura Everingham, clasping my mother's hand, emotion lending new charms to her winning face and manner, 'do you think there is danger?'

'Heaven alone knows; if indeed the sheltie galloped towards the Uisc Dhu—' my mother paused, for even her strong antagonism to this fair daughter of a man she hated, and against whom all her fierce and antiquated Celtic prejudices were enlisted, could not withstand the charm of Laura's winning eye; thus she left nothing unsaid to comfort her and to soothe her terror. In this she was joined by Miss Clavering, a fine, handsome, and showy English girl, whose beautiful and sparkling eyes, dark hair, and nose retroussé, piquant manner, and graceful tournure, made her, as her brother Tom Clavering, of the Grenadier Guards, constantly affirmed, 'one of the finest girls about town,' meaning London, of course.

'And you saw a white stag?'

'Yes—white as snow,' answered the girls, together.

'Dhia!' exclaimed my mother; 'if it should be the white stag of Loch Ora!'

'Why—what then?'

'It is said to be enchanted—it never dies, and never appears but as a harbinger of evil!'

'Heavens, dear madam, don't say so, pray!' urged Laura, weeping bitterly, and here Callum Dhu and I left them.

Followed by Captain Tom Clavering and his friend, Mr. Adolphus Frederick Snobleigh, who, with their glazed boots, scarlet shirts, and blue neckties, tight pantaloons, pomaded locks, and bandolined moustaches, were scarcely accoutred for ascending the sides of Ben Ora at midnight, over heather ankle-deep, and drenched in dew, or over—

'Crags, knolls and mounds, confusedly hurled,
The fragments of an earlier world.'

Callum Dhu and I hastened round the base of the mountain, and sought the Craig-na-tuirc for traces of the missing stranger. The moon was clear and bright, though obscured at times by fleecy cloudlets, and we soon reached the summit of the steep craig, or Rock of the Boar, and saw the wild glens and savage peaks of the western Highlands bounding the view on every side, while at our feet lay Loch nan Spiordan, or the Lake of Spirits, which was haunted by the water-horse and bull, and from which the Uisc Dhu, or black stream, brawled through a hundred rough ravines and stony chasms, into the deep dark basin of Loch Ora. Here we paused for a few minutes.

The voice and image of Laura Everingham were still before me; for one more fair or polished had never been beneath the roof-tree of our mountain dwelling, and on regaining my breath, I said, with some emotion, to Callum,

'If he has fallen into the Black Water!'—

'Well—he may turn up about Christmas-time—a bag of bones, stranded on the margin of the loch,' was the grim response.

'And we allowed him to ascend—what will people say?'

'There will be none here to say anything,' was the sharp response; 'by that time Glen Ora will be desolate—its people gone to the shores of the Far West, and the warm hearths where they sit now, will be silent, cold, and grassy.'

'But the Englishman's daughter, Callum?'

'Let her weep to the night wind, and it will hear her, as it has often heard our women weep, when the roofs were torn down and the fires extinguished; when the cabers were tossed upon the heath, and the cottagers were driven in fetters to the shore, like slaves for market.'

'But his daughter is beautiful.'

'Dioul! do you begin to think so?'

'Fair, delicate, and gentle, too, Callum,' I urged, warming a little.

'But what of that? she is a stranger, and not one of us! It was not at such dainty breasts as hers that Lachlan Mohr, who could twist a horse-shoe, or Angus your ancestor, or Alisdair Mac Coll Keitach, who could cleave men from beard to breeks, were suckled.'

'What the deuce does all this matter? I would rather have a silver pound in my pocket than a pedigree an ell long; but wind your horn, and then let us shout.'

Callum blew his horn, but the echoes of the rocks alone replied in prolonged reverberations to the sound. Then we shouted together, and again the echoes were our sole reply. The more I thought of the fair and timid girl now at my mother's house, the more anxious I felt for her father's fate.

Myriads of stars were mirrored in the lone and deep blue Loch of the Spirits, a thousand feet below us, and as we traversed the beetling cliff, the stones we disengaged, rolled over and plashed into the water, with a dull faint sound that was long in ascending to the ear.

'By the Black Stone of Scone,' said Callum, with a Highland grin, 'if the stranger has gone over here on the sheltie, he will have a skinful of cold water by this time.'

'For heaven's sake, don't say so, Callum!'

'Why not?' returned my companion, tartly; 'his first threat, on coming among us, was to put me in prison, because a deer-hide was found in my hut; if he has gone over the Craig-na-tuirc it was his own fate, and you know our proverb—Ni droch dhuine dan na fein! Me in prison, indeed! I swore that I found the deer drowned in the moss, though I shot him at the waterfall, and a brave animal he was—thirty-four stone weight—devil an ounce less, after the gralloch was out of him; so every man in the glen had a savoury supper that night. Must we starve, while the Englishman and the Lowlander have sport enough and to spare, and when the poor are driven mad by the depredations of the game on the crops?'

'Hark! I hear voices!'

Turning in the direction from whence they proceeded, we met Captain Clavering and his companion, the exquisite Mr. Snobleigh, who had just succeeded in overtaking us, breathless, and in great anxiety for Sir Horace.

'It was in that direction Sir Horace was carried by his pony,' said the captain, pointing westward down the rocks.

'Dioul! that is straight for the linn of Glen-dhu-uisc (the glen of the black water), and if so, God save him!' added Callum, touching his bonnet, 'for his bones—before we find them—will have been picked white as china by the gled and iolar. However, let us do what we can, Mac Innon,' he added, hastening onward, his natural kindness of heart penetrating the crust of prejudice and animosity with which he had resolved to protect it from any emotion of sympathy for the new possessor of our lands.

'The mountain sheltie went like lightning,' said Captain Clavering; 'its hoofs struck fire from the rocks at every bound.'

'Aw—yes,' added his companion, the great head of the dynasty of Snobleigh; 'I daresay the poor baronet thought himself astride one of Scott's demmed water kelpies.'

The roar of the cataract, formed by the Uisc Dhu forcing its way through a chasm, and rolling over a ledge of rocks into Loch Ora, now broke the solemn stillness of the midnight hills. We reached a plateau of rock, which overhung the fall, and we felt it trembling and vibrating in the concussion of the waters, which roared and rushed in one broad, ceaseless, and snow-white torrent, into a deep dark pool below. Its height was startling; its sides bristled with ghastly rocks, and these were fringed by tangled masses of green shrubbery and wild plants. Glittering in the moonlight like dew, or a continual shower of revolving diamonds, the transparent foam arose from the profundity into which the descending waters bellowed, and beyond which they swept away round the mountain in placid silence, forming Loch Ora, where the black ouzel and the wild swan floated in the radiance of the summer moon.

Captain Clavering appeared to be impressed by this majestic scene, but his companion, a restless Londoner, prattled and talked, and ever and anon shouted 'Sir Horace!' in the voice of a peacock proclaiming rain.

'Stay; I hear something,' said I; 'it comes from yonder rock.'

'No, no,' replied Callum, hastily; 'do not say so—that is Sien Sluai (the dwelling of a multitude). Often when my father was benighted, he has seen lights glitter there, and heard the sound of music, dancing feet, and merry little voices.'

A moment after, we heard a lamentable cry, that was quite different from the echoes.

'Good heaven!' exclaimed Captain Clavering, 'there is some one over the fall—or in it. Did you not hear a voice? There it is again!'

'Dioul! I have heard it twice already, but thought it was a hart roaring in the forest,' said Callum; 'and here are the hoofmarks of a pony, fresh in the turf, at the very edge of the Fall.'

'Help!' cried a piteous voice, which ascended from the abyss beneath us, and sounded above the hiss and roar of the hurrying waters; 'help, in the name of the blessed God!'

'Merciful heaven, it is Sir Horace!' exclaimed Captain Clavering, peering over.

'Aw—aw, good gwacious—gwacious goodness! aw-aw, what a dreadful situation!' added Snobleigh, aghast.

Upon a ledge of rock that jutted over the fall about twenty feet below the plateau on which we stood, lay the unfortunate baronet, crouching in a place where the beetling rocks rose above him, and where they descended sheer below to a depth which the eye and mind shrank from contemplating. His pony had become unmanageable, or disliked the severity with which it was whipped and spurred; thus on getting the bit between its teeth, it scoured along the terrible ridge of the Craig-na-tuirc like the wind, and rushed headlong towards the cascade. In deadly terror, the portly baronet had thrown himself off this fierce and shaggy little charger, but too late; he was just at the edge of the fall over which the pony went headlong like a flying Pegasus. Desperately Sir Horace clung to the bracken and heather on the verge of the chasm; but both gave way, and he toppled over!—sight, sound, hearing, and sensation left him as he fell into the abyss, believing all was over; but the sharp, cool, smoky spray revived him, and on recovering, he found himself safely and softly shelved on a turf-covered ledge of rock, from which an ascent unaided was totally impracticable, as the cliff above him was a sheer wall of twenty feet high; and a safe descent was equally impossible, for below, two hundred feet and more, pouring like ceaseless thunder, the cascade roared, boomed, boiled, and whirled; he shut his eyes, and for the first time since childhood, perhaps, endeavoured to arrange his thoughts in prayer.

Imagine the sensations of this right honourable baronet, and M.P. for 'the gentlemanly interest'—this old Regent-street lounger and man-about-town, accustomed to all the butterfly enjoyment, the ease, elegance, and luxury wealth can procure, and London furnish, on finding himself at midnight in the region of old romance and much imaginary barbarism—-in the land of caterans, brownies, and bogles, cowering like a water-rat on a narrow ledge of rock, and on the verge of that tremendous cascade!

Prayer was difficult, new, and unnatural to him; he closed his eyes, and after shouting hopelessly and vainly, he endeavoured not to think at all; terror absorbed all his faculties, and now were he to live for a thousand years he could never forget the miseries and horrors he endured.

His senses wandered, and while the endless linn, stunning and dashing, poured in full flood and mighty volume over the trembling rocks, at one time he imagined himself addressing the House on the Abjuration Oath, the Scottish Appellate Jurisdiction, or some other equally sane and useful institution; or at the opera listening to Mario, Alboni, or Piccolomini; now it was the voice of his daughter, and then the laugh of his ward, Fanny Clavering. The quaint wild stories of the Highland foresters flitted before him, and while strange voices seemed to mingle with the ceaseless roar of that eternal cataract; damp kelpies sprawled their long and clammy fingers over him; paunchy imps and bearded brownies swarmed about his ears like gnats in the moonshine; while grey spectres seemed to peer and jabber at him, from amid the pouring foam and impending rocks.

He grew sick and faint with fear and hopelessness, for he was a cold, proud, and narrow-hearted man; hence the agony of his mind was the greater when he found himself face to face, and front to front, with Death!

Hours passed away; they seemed months, years, ages, still he remained there in a state of torpor and coma. He might fall into the stream; then all would be over; he might linger on for days, his cries unheard, for the country was desolate and depopulated—for days until he perished of slow starvation, and his bones would be left to whiten on that shelf of rock after his flesh had been carried away by the hawks and eagles!

'Horror! horror!' he exclaimed, and shut his eyes.

Suddenly, voices that seemed human met his ear!

He uttered a wild cry for mercy and for succour and the loud Highland haloo of Callum Mac Ian responded. By a lucky chance we had discovered the lost man, when every hope was dying in his arid heart.

A mountain-ash, the sinewy roots of which grasped the fissures of the rocks, and were knotted round them, overhung the chasm, and from this Callum, supported by Clavering and me—the captain was a brave, active, and athletic fellow—lowered down a stout rope, which we desired Sir Horace to tie securely round him; but he was so paralyzed by fear, or so benumbed by cold, that though we reiterated the request again and again, with all the energy his urgent danger could inspire, we were unheeded.

'Dioul! 'smeas so na'n t-alam!' (the devil! this is worse than alum!) grumbled Callum in Gaelic; this old fellow will have the cat's departure in the cascade if he closes his ears thus!'

'What in heaven's name shall we do?' asked Captain Clavering; 'good fellows, can't you advise?'

'Go down into the cascade,' said I.

'Eh—aw—the deuce! good gwacious, you cawnt mean that,' said Snobleigh, with a chill shudder; 'deaw me—what a boaw!'

'He does mean it,' replied Callum, coldly; 'but that shall be my task, for though his spirit is brave, his arm is less strong than mine, and I shall meet the danger first. It was our task of old—I am his co-dhalta, and come of race that were the leine chrios of his father's on many a bloody field—but I forget that you are Englishmen, and know not what I speak of.'

Even while he said this, Callum had flung aside his bonnet and plaid; tied one end of the rope round the ash, and knotted the other round his waist, and begun to descend into the chasm, finding grasps for his hands and rests for his feet where other men would have felt for them in vain; and scaring the polecat from its lair, and the chattering night-hawk from its perch, by his hearty shout of triumph, as he reached Sir Horace, and transferred the rope round his inert and passive form.

'Air Dhia! the old man is like a bundle of dry bracken,' said the bold Highland forester with some contempt; 'hoist away sirs, and be sure that you have a tight hold of your end of the rope!'

Assisted by Mr. Snobleigh, who was in a high state of excitement, the Captain and I drew up the poor baronet, who was almost dead with renewed terror on finding himself suspended like the golden fleece over that roaring gulf; however, we landed him safely, and laid him at length on the thick soft heather to recover his breath and animation, while we lowered the rope to Callum, who with our assistance scrambled up the wall of rock like a squirrel, and stood beside us again.

'Mona mon dioul!' said he, with a hearty laugh, such as can only come from a throat and lungs braced by the keen mountain air; 'this will be a night for the new laird to remember!'

CHAPTER V.
CALLUM DHU.

Morning was beginning to brighten the sky behind the sharp peaks of the eastern hills as we slowly descended from the lofty summit of the Craig-na-tuirc. We had got our English visitors up to that altitude very well; but getting them down from it proved a very different and more arduous affair: Callum at last lost all patience, and saying that he wished he 'had a keallach to carry the dainty bodach in,' hoisted Mr. Snobleigh, bongré malgré, on his shoulders, and sturdily carried him to the foot of the mountain leaving to Captain Clavering and me the task of laughing, and supporting the crest-fallen baronet.

The sun had risen above the mountains when we reached the narrow path that traversed my native and old hereditary glen; the morning wind was lifting the light leaves of the silver birches, and rustling the wiry foliage of the Scottish pines that clothed the steep sides of the lovely valley. At times a roebuck started up from among the green and waving bracken, to vanish with a wild bound into the gloomy thickets; and the pale mist was wreathing the dun summit of Ben Ora.

A flood of amber glory rolled along the hills, lighting up in quick succession each rocky peak and heath-clad cone, and filling all the glens with warmth as the sun arose; and Callum Dhu, whose mind was full of the ancient usages and superstitions of the Gael, raised his bonnet with reverence to the god of day.

''Pon my soul, you are a rum one!' exclaimed Mr. Snobleigh, as he was set on the ground again; 'but—aw—aw—fine fellow after all; we owe you I don't know how much for your bravery, and I for this canter down hill,' he added, unclasping his porte-monnaie.

'I am neither a horse nor a servant,' said Callum, with a dark expression in his eye.

Now that Sir Horace was free from danger, and felt somewhat mollified towards mankind in the Highlands generally, every bitter thought which the teachings of my Celtic mother, the precepts of my nurse, and the example of Callum could inspire, returned with renewed vigour to my breast; and on reaching the rugged bridle-road, with a haughty, hostile, and distant aspect, I touched my bonnet, and on seeing the baronet's carriage approaching (together with Mr. Snaggs on a trotting mountain garron), was about to withdraw, when Clavering politely requested me to stay.

On the patrimonial estate of my forefathers, I found myself regarded as little better than a shepherd, and treated by these pampered strangers as a mere gilly, trapper, or bush-beater; and my fiery spirit revolted within me, on reflecting that the poor attire Callum and myself wore, declared us to be little better. But find, if you may, a Birmingham baronet, or a cotton lord, whose titles came with the Reform Bill, who will acknowledge that a Scottish chief whose name and lineage may be coeval with Old King Cole, or the Wars of Fingal, can be equal to his own.

The carriage halted; a liveried lacquey sprang from the rumble, banged down the steps, and opened the door, on which Laura Everingham and Fanny Clavering alighted to welcome and embrace Sir Horace, who received this demonstration with the proper and well-bred frigidity of one who abhorred 'a scene;' but his daughter hung upon his neck, calling him her 'dear papa—her own papa,' while observing with alarm that he trembled excessively, his whole nervous system being seriously shaken, as well it might.

'You are ill, dear papa!' said Laura, regarding him anxiously.

'A draught from St. Colme's well might do him good,' said Callum Dhu; 'but perhaps he has water enough in him already—and so, a good sup of whisky—'

'Right,' said Captain Clavering, searching in the pocket of the carriage, and producing a flask of brandy, a 'nip' from which greatly revived the old gentleman, who, in a few words, made his daughter and her friend acquainted with the danger he had run, and the courage by which he had been rescued.

'So you see, Mr. Snaggs,' said the baronet, 'our Celt here, with the beard like a French sapeur, has been to me a real friend.'

'Glad to hear it, Sir Horace,' mumbled Snaggs with one of his detestable smiles; 'but how seldom do we find one—what is it the divine Blair saith, Mr. Snobleigh?'

'Eh—aw—don't know, really.'

'It is this, my dear sir; "there is a friend that loveth at all times and a brother that is born for adversity. Thine own friend, and thy father's friend, forsake not."'

'Aw—vewy good—devilish good, indeed!'

Miss Everingham, while her pale cheek glowed, and then grew pale again, fixed her bright eyes, full of tears, and gratitude upon Callum and me, and while touching our hands, timidly, exclaimed,

'Oh, how shall we ever thank you—how repay this!'

'Aw—aw—'pon my soul, that is just what I have been thinking of,' said Snobleigh, who 'mouthed' his words as if he had been reared in the Scottish law courts, where we may daily hear the most astounding and miraculous English that tongue can utter.

My heart throbbed; a new and undefinable emotion thrilled through me, at the touch of Laura's soft and pretty hands, and the truthful, thankful, and earnest glance of her soft blue English eyes.

'Ah, that devil of a pony!' sighed Sir Horace; 'I hope its neck was broken at the cascade. Egad! it started off with me as if it had been running for the Ascot Cup!'

'So did all our cattle. How lucky that we were dismounted!' observed Miss Clavering.

'It was like the Start for the Derby,' laughed her brother.

'Or the Doncaster Cup and Saucer,' added Snobleigh, 'Sir Horace leading the way.'

'But it is time we were moving,' said that personage. 'Come—you, sir, to whom I owe so much—what is your name?'

'Callum Dhu Mac Ian.'

'Ah, well; get into the rumble, and come with us to Glen Ora House, and you shall have lunch and a good bottle of wine with the butler.'

'I do not lunch, neither do I dine with lacqueys,' replied Callum, proudly.

'Whew! aw—I see—these Highland fellows are all alike. Clavering, have you any money about you?'

The captain handed his purse to the baronet, who took from it, and from his own, the gold they contained, and turning to Callum, said—

'My good fellow, here are fifteen sovereigns; but you will call on me at Glen Ora House, and bring your friend with you; new coats and shoes, &c., are at your service; but what the devil is the matter with you?'

'Monna, mon dioul! is it money you would offer me?' asked Callum, as he drew himself up with the air of an Indian king; 'so you value your life at fifteen dirty guineas?'

'How, fellow; do you really wish more?'

'More!' reiterated Callum, fiercely; 'I am a poor man, who, when I lie down at night, thank God that one other day is passed, though I know not where the food of to-morrow may come from. The hills teem with game, and the rivers are alive with fish; yet I dare neither shoot one nor net the other. But keep your gold, Sir Horace. Every coin of it is accursed, for it has come to you through the filthy hands of your factor, and every groat of it is stained by the sweat—the tears—the blood of the Highlanders of Glen Ora, from whom it has been extorted and torn by Ephraim Snaggs, that merciless and rapacious oppressor of the poor!'

Sir Horace stared at this outburst, which Callum Mac Ian, notwithstanding his sharp Celtic accent, and Gaelic being his native language, spoke in good English, and with all the purity and fluency of an educated Highlander. The factor, who was close by muttered something about 'an insolent idle poacher;' but Captain Clavering patted Callum on the shoulder, and exclaimed, in his jolly off-hand way,

'You are a trump! ha, ha, ha—'pon my soul, I like this!'

'You are the most puzzling fellow imaginable!' said Sir Horace, who had now recovered his self-possession, and with it his usual bearing, which was cold, pompous, selfish, and aristocratic (I am sorry to add, ungrateful); he added, 'would your friend take the money?'

The expression of my eye, I presume, startled him, for he asked,

'Who are you, sir, may I ask?'

'Alan Mac Innon,' I replied briefly.

'The idle, roving son of a poor widow,' suggested the amiable Mr. Snaggs, with a dark look.

'Widow of the last Glen Ora, Captain of Grenadiers in the Black Watch,' said Callum, sharply; 'Co-dhalta,' he added to me, in Gaelic—'be not offended—they are strangers, and know no better.'

'Well, well, I must leave to our sermon-quoting friend, Mr. Snaggs, the task of rewarding you, for, egad, I know not how to treat you,' said Sir Horace, turning towards the carriage and handing in Miss Clavering and his daughter Laura; 'but give them a dram, Clavering—it will be acceptable all round, I have no doubt.'

Callum Dhu produced from his jacket pocket a silver-rimmed quaigh, which had belonged to the ill-fated Mac Ian of the '45, and from which it was averred Prionse Tearlach himself had drunk. The captain filled it with brandy for me, and I drank and bowed to all. It was refilled for my foster-brother, who, while lifting his bonnet, bowed politely to the strangers, and then turning to me, added,

'Mo Cheann Chinnidh-sa! Beannachd Dhe' oirbh!' (i.e., My own chief—God bless you!')

My heart swelled; his chief! and I had no right to the soil, beyond the dust that adhered to my shoes; yet Callum's respect for me was as great as if I possessed all the lands of the Siol nan Alpin.

'Egad, this is like some of the things I have read of in the Scotch novels,' said Sir Horace, with a supercilious smile; 'is it not, Laura?'

'Exactly, papa.'

'If I had only my sketch-book here,' added her friend.

'Aw—yaas—vewy good,' drawled Mr. Snobleigh, as he applied a vesta to his meerschaum; 'here we have a couple of bare-legged Sawney Beans, and all we want is a witch with a caldron—

"Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake:
Eye of newt and toe of frawg,
Wool of bat and tongue of dawg,"

and all that sort of thing—a brownie—aw-aw—a black dwarf, and so forth; eh, Miss Everingham?'

'Anything you please, Mr. Snobleigh, now that dear papa is safe.'

'Safe,' added the frank Tom Clavering; 'but for our brave and sturdy friends, he had now perhaps been at the bottom of yonder lock—or loch, as they call it.'

'It is a bit of romance, Laura, love,' said Miss Clavering, with one of her brightest smiles; 'do not the place, the costume, and the whole affair, remind you of—what is it—you remember the book, Mr. Snobleigh?'

'Eh—aw, yaas,' was the languid reply; 'but do you admire the costume, eh? I was once nearly dispensing with the superfluous luxury of pantaloons myself, and, aw-aw, exchanging from the Grenadier Gawds into an 'Ighland corps, which threw us into the shade in the Phoenix Pawk.'

'The deuce you were,' said Clavering; 'that would be to commence the sliding-scale, Snob, my boy; from the Guards to the line, and from thence'—

'Eh—aw—to the dawgs.'

'You are a noble fellow,' said Laura Everingham to Callum; 'and I shall never, never forget you!'

Callum bowed.

'Give my dearest love to Mrs. Mac Innon—the kind old lady your mother,' she added to me; 'and say that I shall ever remember her kindness—poor dear old thing—and she so ill too!'

'Aw—Snaggs, old fellow—do you think she has any knowledge of the aw—aw—second sight?'

'Why?' inquired Snaggs, with a furtive glance at me.

'I have made up a devilish heavy book on the Derby, and wondaw rathaw which horse will win,' said Snobleigh.

Snaggs smiled faintly, and reined back his pony.

Although at that time only the half of what this fine gentleman said was understood by me, I gave him a glance so furious, that after attempting to survey me coolly through his glass for a second, he grew pale, smiled, and looked another way.

At last, the baronet grew weary of all this; he pocketed his purse, and stepped into the carriage; his friends found seats also—the steps were shut up—the door closed, and with its varnished wheels flashing in the morning sun, away it bowled, the horses, two fine bays, at a rapid trot, and Snaggs spurring furiously behind. Callum and I were left on the narrow mountain-path with saddened, humbled, and irritated hearts, that smarted and rebelled under the loftiness of tone which the possession of 'a little filthy lucre,' enabled these blasé voluptuaries to assume towards us, who were the old hereditary sons of the soil.

'I would ask you to my hut,' said Callum, 'but for three days no food has been there.'

'Come, Callum—come with me, and though I have but little to offer, that little shall be shared with you and a thousand welcomes to it,' said I, and we turned our steps together homeward.

CHAPTER VI.
WHICH TREATS OF MANY THINGS.

I have said that Laura Everingham was pretty rather than beautiful, and graceful rather than dignified. I may add, that she was winning rather than witty; but her friend Miss Clavering was both beautiful and brilliant; and frequently as I had seen both these attractive English girls, it was Laura, whose gentleness, voice, and face, made the most vivid impression on me; and thus, with my mind full of her image, I returned slowly and thoughtfully towards the old jointure-house of Glen Ora.

Three weeks passed away.

The great service we, or Callum, rather, had rendered to Sir Horace, was forgotten, for the adventures of that night had given the baronet a violent and all-absorbing fit of the gout, and a fever which confined him to bed; and amid his friends, the luxuries which surrounded him, and the frivolities of fashionable life, he forgot that save for the fearless heart and strong arm of Mac Ian he must have perished by the waters of the Uisc Dhu, without leaving, perhaps, a trace of his fate behind. And poor Callum—he whose Spartan virtue had declined the proffered reward—was often almost starving; for his little crop had failed; his patches of wheat and potatoes were blighted, though carefully reared on the sunny side of Ben Ora; and, like others in the glen, he anticipated with sorrow and anxiety the usual visit of the pious and uncompromising Snaggs when the term-time arrived.

My poor mother's health was failing fast, and as it failed, her spirit sank. She lacked many comforts which I was without the means of procuring; and though old Mhari and her niece Minnie were unwearying and unremitting in their kindness and ministry, she seemed to be dying literally by inches, yet without any visible ailment—a painful and a terrible contemplation for me, who, except the people in the glen, and the ties of blood old Highland custom and tradition gave between us, had not another relative in the world; for all my kindred—ay more than thirty of them—had died, as I have said, in the service of their country.

She was passing away from among us, and now, for her sake, I regretted that my foster-brother had not stooped to avail himself of the reward proffered by Sir Horace; for even that small sum would have been at her service, as honest Callum Mac Ian loved and revered her as if she had been his own mother.

With such sad, bitter, and humiliating reflections, the memory of the winning smile, the thankful glance, and soft pretty manner of Laura Everingham, struggled hard for mastery; but as weeks rolled on, these pleasing recollections gave place to a just emotion of anger, at what I deemed her cold and haughty neglect of my mother, whom she had neither visited nor invited to the new house of Glen Ora. Vague suspicions floated in my mind that Snaggs the factor was in some degree to blame for this apparent discourtesy, and these surmises afterwards proved to be correct. Moreover, the moustached Captain Clavering, and his perfumed friend, Mr. Adolphus Frederick Snobleigh, whom we saw shooting and deer-stalking on the hill sides, usually passed me with a nod or glance of recognition, because I was coarsely clad, and to them seemed but a mountain gilly, though every bonnet in Glen Ora was veiled at my approach in reverence to the name I inherited. But this was the result of old Celtic sympathies—the ties of clanship and kindred, the historical, traditionary, and poetic veneration of the Highland peasant for the head of his house, humbled and poor though that house may be; sympathies deep, bitter, fiery and enthusiastic, and beyond the comprehension of a devil-may-care guardsman like Clavering, or an effeminate blasé parvenu, and man-about-town, like Snobleigh.

Once a liveried lacquey with a well-powdered head brought a beautiful bouquet of flowers 'with Miss Everingham's love to Mrs. Captain Mac Innon;' but as this knock-knee'd gentleman in the red plush inexpressibles was over-attentive to our pretty Minnie, her lover Callum flung him out of the front door, and tore his livery; and such was the report made by Mr. Jeames Toodles of his reception at the old jointure-house, that no more messages came from the family of Sir Horace.

Now came the crisis in the fortunes of the cottars of Glen Ora. The postman who travelled once weekly over the mountains, and bore the letters for the district, in a leathern bag strapped across his back, brought for each resident, myself included, a notice that Mr. Ephraim Snaggs would be in the glen on a certain day, to hold a rent-court, and collect the arrears; with a brief intimation, that if all demands were not satisfied in full, the houses would be destroyed, and the people driven off. That night, there went a wail of lamentation through the glen; the women wept, and the men gazed about them with the sullen apathy in which a despairing mariner may see his ship going down into the ocean, for there were neither remedy nor mercy to be expected. Our people were able to live comfortably in the glen, as for ages their forefathers had done, marrying and giving in marriage—increasing and multiplying, till their corn patches and little green cottages dotted all the mountain slopes; but curbed by the game-laws, and thence deprived of those substitutes by which nature replaced the sterility of the soil—ruined by the wanton destruction of the kelp manufacture, and by having their rents doubled, tripled, and quadrupled with the deliberate intention that they should be unable to pay them, and hence afford to the feudal lord of the land a LEGAL EXCUSE for sweeping them to the sea-shore, that the glens may be made a wilderness for game, and their hearths a lair for the deer, the fox, and the wild cat—the peasantry found themselves helpless! And thus it is, that in virtue of a fragment of sheepskin, we find men in Scotland, exerting over their fellow-men a murderous and inhuman tyranny; such as was never wielded by the worst feudal despots in the middle ages of Germany, or in the present days of Russia. But to resume my story:

In addition to our little household, we had now to support Callum Dhu, who had been afflicted by a sickness—I verily believe, the result of mere want and privation, for he was too proud to acknowledge, that occasionally days elapsed without his fast being broken. He was entitled to four hundred merks Scots, and a good dram for every fox's head; but as he was weak and ailing, the foxes got into places beyond his reach, and rabbits became scarce. We could not see Callum starve; for never did brother love brother more sincerely than my fosterer loved me; and but for this sentiment, and his ardent regard for Minnie and his native glen, the poor fellow had long since abandoned his hut, and joined one of our eight Highland regiments.

Now came 'the day—the great, the eventful day,' when Snaggs the factor, accompanied by his clerk (the latter custodier of a wooden box and a green-baize bag), both on trotting Highland garrons, appeared at the lower entrance of the glen, their advance into which was witnessed by the cottars with greater excitement, and certainly far more terror than their forefathers, when beholding the Sliochd Dhiarmed an Tuirc, numbering a thousand swordsmen under Black Colin of Rhodez, march through the same pass against the Mac Innons of Glen Ora, and the Mac Intyres of Glen O.

And now, with the reader's permission, I will devote a short paragraph to Mr. Snaggs.

He was externally a very religious man, and grave in his deportment, being an elder of a dissenting kirk. Having been bred to the law in Edinburgh, he spoke with an extremely English accent, as nothing Scottish is much in vogue about 'the Parliament House;' for unfortunately, the language which our Lowlanders received from their brave ancestors who came from the Cimbric Chersonese—a language in which the sweetest of our poets have sung—the language spoken by Mary Queen of Scots, in which Knox preached, and all our laws are written, is voted vulgar by the growing 'snobbishness' of the Scottish people themselves—excuse the term pray, but I know of none more suitable—hence Mr. Snaggs spoke with a marvellous accent, and it would have been quite in vain to quote to such as he the words of honest Ninian Wingate, when he warned John Knox—'Gif ye throw curiositie of novationis hes forgot our auld plane Scottis qwhilk your mither lernit you, in tymes coming I sall wryt to yow my mynd in Latin, for I am nocht acquynt with your Southeron.' Mr. Snaggs went to kirk thrice on Sunday; he was a member of various tract-distributing societies, and always wore a white neckcloth, and scrupulously accurate suit of black; he was a great believer in whisky-toddy and the patriotism of the Lord Advocate. Honesty and charity were ever in his mouth, but never in his heart or hand; he never swore by aught save his honour, which was a somewhat tattered article. He never was known to do good by stealth 'and blush to find it fame;' but he subscribed largely to all printed lists, especially such as were headed by philanthropic and noble depopulators. His keen grey eyes were expressive alternately of cunning and malevolence, while his mouth wore a perpetual smile or grin. Cringing and mean to the rich, Snaggs was a tyrant and oppressor of the poor, and led the van of that all-but-organized system of extermination pursued by certain infamous dukes, marquises, and lairds towards the poor Highland peasantry; and he was a vehement advocate for the substitution of bare sheep-walks and useless game-preserves, instead of glens studded by little cottages, and teeming with life and rural health, and peopled by a brave and hardy race, who in the ranks of war gave place to none, and who, although they have no feudal charters, are by right of inheritance the true lords of the soil.

Such was the smooth, pious, fawning but terrible Ephraim Snaggs, who made his appearance in Glen Ora punctually at eleven o'clock on the appointed day. Now we had no longer any hope of remaining in the old jointure-house, for I do not believe that anything save a miracle would have raised fifty pounds among us, and the age of miracles is past.

CHAPTER VII.
THE RENT COURT.

I shall never forget the emotion of shame that glowed within me on finding myself compelled to avoid this miserable worm.

'He is coming! he is coming!' exclaimed Minnie, wringing her hands, as we perceived from the dining-room window two mounted figures appear in the gorge of the glen.

'Oclion! ochon! ochon!' chorused old Mhari, lifting up her hands, 'the sorrows that have fallen upon us would sink the blessed ship of Clanronald.'

Callum uttered a hearty oath in Gaelic, and pulled his bonnet over his knitted brow.

Mr. Snaggs dismounted at the door and gave his green bag to Minnie, on whom he smiled familiarly, and then perceiving that she was pretty, he pinched her rosy cheek, and eyed her with a glance that had more of a leer than benignity in it; but he was always singularly suave to Minnie. Being too indisposed to receive him, my mother remained in her own room, and I—knowing that we had not the cash to meet his demands, took my rod and went to the Loch nan Spiordan for our supper; as there the tarr-dhiargan, or red-bellied char, were in great plenty, and the banks were a favourite ride of Laura Everingham. For Snaggs I left a note, filled with the old excuses, of wet weather, bad crops, corn destroyed by the south-west wind, sheep with the rot, cattle with the murrain, hard times, and so forth. He read it over—smiled faintly, and after carefully folding and docketing it, he seated himself at a table which was placed in front of the house under an ancient lime, on the branches of which many a cateran from the isles had swung in the wind. There his clerk arranged his papers, and while the poor dejected defaulters came slowly down the glen communing sorrowfully together, Mr. Snaggs regaled himself on bread, cheese, and a dram which Callum Dhu placed before him, with more of old Highland hospitality than the factor merited.

The excitement was general; thirty-two families the remnant of our once powerful tribe, all linked and connected together by ties of blood, descent, and misfortune, hovered on the brink of ruin.

One by one, the tenants approached bonnet in hand, and before this man of power and parchment bent their heads that under braver auspices would not have stooped to the whistle of a cannon-ball. Poor people! their tremulous but earnest excuses for the lack of money, though their small rents varied only from fifteen to twenty pounds or so, and the half-uttered prayers for mercy, from those who could no more pay this, than liquidate the National Debt, were all the same.

One named Ian Mac Raonuil had been ten years a soldier, and though thrice wounded, was unpensioned, as there was a break in his service, having enlisted twice. Latterly he had earned a scanty subsistence by fishing in the salt lochs beyond Ben Ora; he was now sixty years of age, and had seven children. He could pay the old rent, but was totally unable to pay the new, which was exactly triple what had ever been paid for his poor cottage within the memory of man. The factor shook his legal head—-made an entry in his black-book—handed to the haggard-eyed Mac Raonuil (as he did to all) a pious tract, and summoned the next on his fatal roll.