service that day, but considering that he would have
enough to do with his own work, he went to prepare his clan for the
hour that was near at hand.

Dundee dismissed his staff for the time on various duties, and
attended only by Grimond, sat down upon a knoll, from which he could
see the whole plateau of Urrard--the drawn-out line of his own army
beneath him, and the corresponding formation of the English troops in
the distance. He read MacKay's prayer slowly and reverently, and then,
letting the paper fall upon the grass, Dundee fell into a reverie.
There was a day when he would have treated the prayer lightly, not
because he had ever been a profane man, like Esau, but because he had
no relish for soldiers who acted as chaplains.

To-day, with the lists of battle before his eyes, and the ordeal of
last night still fresh in his experience, and his inexcusable cruelty
to Jean, his heart was weighed with a sense of the tragedy of life and
the tears of things. He was going to fight unto death for his king,
but he was haunted by the conviction that William was a wiser and
better monarch. MacKay and he were to cross swords, as before they had
crossed words, and would ever cross principles, but he could not help
confessing to himself that MacKay, in the service of the Prince of
Orange, had for years been doing a more soldierly part than his, in
hunting to the death Covenanting peasants. His Highlanders below,
hungering for the joy of battle and the gathering of spoil, were brave
and faithful, but they were little more than savages, and woe betide
the land that lay beneath their sword; while the troops on the other
side represented the forces of order and civilization, and though they
might be routed that evening, they held the promise of final victory.
Was it worth the doing, and something of which afterwards a man could
be proud, to restore King James to Whitehall, and place Scotland again
in the hands of the gang of cowards and evil livers, thieves and liars
who had misgoverned it and shamefully treated himself? What a confused
and tangled web life was, and who had eyes to decipher its pattern? He
would live and die for the Stuarts, as Montrose had done before him;
he could not take service under William, nor be partner with the
Covenanters. He could do none otherwise, and yet, what a Scotland it
would be under James, and what a miserable business for him to return
to the hunt of the Covenanters!

The buoyancy of the mo