? Could
you find in yonder distant country the lakes and the mountains that
you leave behind you here? Can you hunt the deer of Breadalbane in
the forests of America, or will the ocean afford you the silver-scaled
salmon of the Awe? Consider, then, what is your loss, and, like a wise
man, set it against what you have won."

"I have lost all, mother," replied Hamish, "since I have broken my word,
and lost my honour. I might tell my tale, but who, oh, who would believe
me?" The unfortunate young man again clasped his hands together, and,
pressing them to his forehead, hid his face upon the bed.

Elspat was now really alarmed, and perhaps wished the fatal deceit had
been left unattempted. She had no hope or refuge saving in the eloquence
of persuasion, of which she possessed no small share, though her total
ignorance of the world as it actually existed rendered its energy
unavailing. She urged her son, by every tender epithet which a parent
could bestow, to take care for his own safety.

"Leave me," she said, "to baffle your pursuers. I will save your life--I
will save your honour. I will tell them that my fair-haired Hamish fell
from the Corrie Dhu (black precipice) into the gulf, of which human eye
never beheld the bottom. I will tell them this, and I will fling your
plaid on the thorns which grow on the brink of the precipice, that they
may believe my words. They will believe, and they will return to the Dun
of the double-crest; for though the Saxon drum can call the living to
die, it cannot recall the dead to their slavish standard. Then will we
travel together far northward to the salt lakes of Kintail, and place
glens and mountains betwixt us and the sons of Dermid. We will visit the
shores of the dark lake; and my kinsmen--for was not my mother of
the children of Kenneth, and will they not remember us with the old
love?--my kinsmen will receive us with the affection of the olden time,
which lives in those distant glens, where the Gael still dwell in their
nobleness, unmingled with the churl Saxons, or with the base brood that
are their tools and their slaves."

The energy of the language, somewhat allied to hyperbole, even in its
most ordinary expressions, now seemed almost too weak to afford Elspat
the means of bringing out the splendid picture which she presented to
her son of the land in which she proposed to him to take refuge. Yet the
colours were few with which she could paint her Highland paradise.
"The h