at the
trade of the cateran was now alike dangerous and discreditable, and that
if he were to emulate his father's progress, it must be in some other
line of warfare more consonant to the opinions of the present day.

As the faculties of mind and body began to expand, he became more
sensible of the precarious nature of his situation, of the erroneous
views of his mother, and her ignorance respecting the changes of the
society with which she mingled so little. In visiting friends and
neighbours, he became aware of the extremely reduced scale to which his
parent was limited, and learned that she possessed little or nothing
more than the absolute necessaries of life, and that these were
sometimes on the point of failing. At times his success in fishing and
the chase was able to add something to her subsistence; but he saw no
regular means of contributing to her support, unless by stooping to
servile labour, which, if he himself could have endured it, would, he
knew, have been like a death's-wound to the pride of his mother.

Elspat, meanwhile, saw with surprise that Hamish Bean, although now tall
and fit for the field, showed no disposition to enter on his father's
scene of action. There was something of the mother at her heart, which
prevented her from urging him in plain terms to take the field as a
cateran, for the fear occurred of the perils into which the trade must
conduct him; and when she would have spoken to him on the subject, it
seemed to her heated imagination as if the ghost of her husband arose
between them in his bloody tartans, and laying his finger on his lips,
appeared to prohibit the topic. Yet she wondered at what seemed his want
of spirit, sighed as she saw him from day to day lounging about in the
long-skirted Lowland coat which the legislature had imposed upon the
Gael instead of their own romantic garb, and thought how much nearer he
would have resembled her husband had he been clad in the belted plaid
and short hose, with his polished arms gleaming at his side.

Besides these subjects for anxiety, Elspat had others arising from the
engrossing impetuosity of her temper. Her love of MacTavish Mhor had
been qualified by respect and sometimes even by fear, for the cateran
was not the species of man who submits to female government; but over
his son she had exerted, at first during childhood, and afterwards in
early youth, an imperious authority, which gave her maternal love a
character of jealousy. S