uld keep him from with the words that frighten children." This
idea, when once it occurred to her, seemed the more reasonable, that
MacPhadraick, as she well knew, himself a cautious man, had so far
encouraged her husband's practices as occasionally to buy cattle of
MacTavish, although he must have well known how they were come by,
taking care, however, that the transaction was so made as to be
accompanied with great profit and absolute safety. Who so likely as
MacPhadraick to indicate to a young cateran the glen in which he could
commence his perilous trade with most prospect of success? Who so likely
to convert his booty into money? The feelings which another might have
experienced on believing that an only son had rushed forward on the same
path in which his father had perished, were scarce known to the Highland
mothers of that day. She thought of the death of MacTavish Mhor as that
of a hero who had fallen in his proper trade of war, and who had not
fallen unavenged. She feared less for her son's life than for his
dishonour. She dreaded, on his account, the subjection to strangers, and
the death-sleep of the soul which is brought on by what she regarded as
slavery.

The moral principle which so naturally and so justly occurs to the mind
of those who have been educated under a settled government of laws that
protect the property of the weak against the incursions of the strong,
was to poor Elspat a book sealed and a fountain closed. She had been
taught to consider those whom they call Saxons as a race with whom the
Gael were constantly at war; and she regarded every settlement of theirs
within the reach of Highland incursion as affording a legitimate object
of attack and plunder. Her feelings on this point had been strengthened
and confirmed, not only by the desire of revenge for the death of
her husband, but by the sense of general indignation entertained, not
unjustly, through the Highlands of Scotland, on account of the barbarous
and violent conduct of the victors after the battle of Culloden. Other
Highland clans, too, she regarded as the fair objects of plunder, when
that was possible, upon the score of ancient enmities and deadly feuds.

The prudence that might have weighed the slender means which the times
afforded for resisting the efforts of a combined government, which had,
in its less compact and established authority, been unable to put down
the ravages of such lawless caterans as MacTavish Mhor, was unkn