'Callum
More's fingers as easily as he has done through ours."

"Do you think," said the Englishman, "that the Marquis will not respect,
in Captain Dalgetty's person, the laws of civilized war?"

"No more than I would respect a Lowland proclamation," said Angus
M'Aulay.--"But come along, it is time I were returning to my guests."

CHAPTER IX.

. . . . In a rebellion,
When what's not meet, but what must be, was law,
Then were they chosen, in a better hour,
Let what is meet be said it must be meet,
And throw their power i' the dust.--CORIOLANUS.
In a small apartment, remote from the rest of the guests assembled at
the castle, Sir Duncan Campbell was presented with every species of
refreshment, and respectfully attended by Lord Menteith, and by Allan
M'Aulay. His discourse with the latter turned upon a sort of hunting
campaign, in which they had been engaged together against the Children
of the Mist, with whom the Knight of Ardenvohr, as well as the M'Aulays,
had a deadly and irreconcilable feud. Sir Duncan, however, speedily
endeavoured to lead back the conversation to the subject of his present
errand to the castle of Darnlinvarach.

"It grieved him to the very heart," he said, "to see that friends and
neighbours, who should stand shoulder to shoulder, were likely to be
engaged hand to hand in a cause which so little concerned them. What
signifies it," he said, "to the Highland Chiefs, whether King or
Parliament got uppermost? Were it not better to let them settle their
own differences without interference, while the Chiefs, in the meantime,
took the opportunity of establishing their own authority in a manner
not to be called in question hereafter by either King or Parliament?"
He reminded Allan M'Aulay that the measures taken in the last reign
to settle the peace, as was alleged, of the Highlands, were in fact
levelled at the patriarchal power of the Chieftains; and he mentioned
the celebrated settlement of the Fife Undertakers, as they were
called, in the Lewis, as part of a deliberate plan, formed to introduce
strangers among the Celtic tribes, to destroy by degrees their ancient
customs and mode of government, and to despoil them of the inheritance
of their fathers. [In the reign of James VI., an attempt of rather an
extraordinary kind was made to civilize the extreme northern part of the
Hebridean Archipelago. That monarch granted the property of the Island
of Lewis, as if it had