e barbarous and brutal Macdonalds, and of the
measured march and unfaltering notes of their piper outside the burning
chapel, when her perishing ancestors were shrieking in their agony
within. She was acquainted also with the resembling story of that Cave
of Eigg, in which a body of the Macdonalds themselves, consisting of
men, women, and children--the entire population of the island--had been
suffocated wholesale by the Macleods of Skye; and I have heard from her
more good sense on the subject of the Highland character "ere the gospel
changed it," as illustrated by these passages in their history, than
from some Highlanders sane enough on other matters, but carried away by
a too indiscriminating respect for the wild courage and half-instinctive
fidelity of the old race. The ancient Highlanders were bold, faithful
dogs, she has said, ready to die for their masters, and prepared to do,
at their bidding, like other dogs, the most cruel and wicked actions;
and as dogs often were they treated; nay, even still, after religion had
made them men (as if condemned to suffer for the sins of their parents),
they were frequently treated as dogs. The pious martyrs of the south had
contended in God's behalf; whereas the poor Highlanders of the north had
but contended in behalf of their chiefs; and so, while God had been kind
to the descendants of _His_ servants, the chiefs had been very unkind to
the descendants of theirs. From excellent sense, however, in these
conversations, my new companion used often to wander into deplorable
insanity. Her midnight visits to the old chapel of Gillie-christ were
made, she said, in order that she might consult her father in her
difficulties; and the good man, though often silent for nights together,
rarely failed to soothe and counsel her from the depths of his quiet
grave, on every occasion when her unhappiness became extreme. It was
acting on his advice, however, that she had set fire to a door that had
for a time excluded her from the burying-ground, and burnt it down. She
had been married in early life; and I have rarely heard anything wilder
or more ingenious than the account she gave of a quarrel with her
husband, that terminated in their separation.

After living happily with him for several years, she all at once, she
said, became most miserable, and everything in their household went on
ill. But though her husband seemed to have no true conception of the
cause of their new-born misery, she