astures, no one challenging
the intrusion. In the general distress of the country, her ancient
acquaintances had little to bestow; but what they could part with from
their own necessities, they willingly devoted to the relief of others,
From Lowlanders she sometimes demanded tribute, rather than requested
alms. She had not forgotten she was the widow of MacTavish Mhor, or that
the child who trotted by her knee might, such were her imaginations,
emulate one day the fame of his father, and command the same influence
which he had once exerted without control. She associated so little with
others, went so seldom and so unwillingly from the wildest recesses
of the mountains, where she usually dwelt with her goats, that she
was quite unconscious of the great change which had taken place in
the country around her--the substitution of civil order for military
violence, and the strength gained by the law and its adherents over
those who were called in Gaelic song, "the stormy sons of the sword."
Her own diminished consequence and straitened circumstances she indeed
felt, but for this the death of MacTavish Mhor was, in her apprehension,
a sufficing reason; and she doubted not that she should rise to her
former state of importance when Hamish Bean (or fair-haired James)
should be able to wield the arms of his father. If, then, Elspat was
repelled, rudely when she demanded anything necessary for her wants, or
the accommodation of her little flock, by a churlish farmer, her threats
of vengeance, obscurely expressed, yet terrible in their tenor, used
frequently to extort, through fear of her maledictions, the relief which
was denied to her necessities; and the trembling goodwife, who gave meal
or money to the widow of MacTavish Mhor, wished in her heart that the
stern old carlin had been burnt on the day her husband had his due.

Years thus ran on, and Hamish Bean grew up--not, indeed, to be of his
father's size or strength, but to become an active, high-spirited,
fair-haired youth, with a ruddy cheek, an eye like an eagle's, and all
the agility, if not all the strength, of his formidable father, upon
whose history and achievements his mother dwelt, in order to form her
son's mind to a similar course of adventures. But the young see the
present state of this changeful world more keenly than the old. Much
attached to his mother, and disposed to do all in his power for her
support, Hamish yet perceived, when he mixed with the world, th