observances which had been handed down from
her parents. On Hamish the Reverend Mr. Tyrie had bestowed instructions
when he was occasionally thrown in his way; and if the seed fell among
the brambles and thorns of a wild and uncultivated disposition, it
had not yet been entirely checked or destroyed. There was something so
ghastly in the present expression of the youth's features that the
good man was tempted to go down to the hovel, and inquire whether any
distress had befallen the inhabitants, in which his presence might be
consoling and his ministry useful. Unhappily he did not persevere in
this resolution, which might have saved a great misfortune, as he would
have probably become a mediator for the unfortunate young man; but a
recollection of the wild moods of such Highlanders as had been educated
after the old fashion of the country, prevented his interesting himself
in the widow and son of the far-dreaded robber, MacTavish Mhor, and
he thus missed an opportunity, which he afterwards sorely repented, of
doing much good.

When Hamish MacTavish entered his mother's hut, it was only to throw
himself on the bed he had left, and exclaiming, "Undone, undone!" to
give vent, in cries of grief and anger, to his deep sense of the deceit
which had been practised on him, and of the cruel predicament to which
he was reduced.

Elspat was prepared for the first explosion of her son's passion, and
said to herself, "It is but the mountain torrent, swelled by the thunder
shower. Let us sit and rest us by the bank; for all its present tumult,
the time will soon come when we may pass it dryshod." She suffered his
complaints and his reproaches, which were, even in the midst of his
agony, respectful and affectionate, to die away without returning any
answer; and when, at length, having exhausted all the exclamations of
sorrow which his language, copious in expressing the feelings of the
heart, affords to the sufferer, he sunk into a gloomy silence, she
suffered the interval to continue near an hour ere she approached her
son's couch.

"And now," she said at length, with a voice in which the authority of
the mother was qualified by her tenderness, "have you exhausted your
idle sorrows, and are you able to place what you have gained against
what you have lost? Is the false son of Dermid your brother, or the
father of your tribe, that you weep because you cannot bind yourself
to his belt, and become one of those who must do his bidding