there were left at
home Hamish and Shenac, who were twins, Dan, Hugh, Colin, and little
Flora, the youngest and dearest of them all. The anxieties of the
parents were not suffered to sadden the lives of the children, and the
little MacIvors Bhan were as merry young people as one could wish to
see.

Though they were not so prosperous, they were a far happier household
than the MacIvors Dhu. There was the same number of children in each
family; but Angus Dhu's children were most of them older than their
cousins, and while Angus Bhan had six sons and two daughters, Angus Dhu
had six daughters and two sons. "His cousin should have been a far
richer man than he, with so many sons," Angus Dhu used to say grimly.
But three of the boys of Angus Bhan were only children still, and one of
them was a cripple. And as for the daughters of Angus Dhu, they had
been as good as sons even for the farm-work, labouring in the fields, as
is the custom for young women in this part of the country, as
industriously and as efficiently as men--far more so, indeed, than their
own brother Evan did; for he was often impatient of the closeness with
which his father kept them all at work, and it was this, quite as much
as his love of adventure and his wish to see the world, that made him go
away at last. The two eldest daughters were married, and the third was
living away from home; so, after Evan left, there were four in their
father's house--three girls and Dan, the youngest of the family, who was
twelve years of age. The children of these two families had always been
good friends. Indeed, the younger children of Angus Dhu had more
pleasure in the house of their father's cousin than in their own home;
and many a winter evening they were in the habit of passing there.

They had a very quiet winter after Lewis went away. There was less
visiting and going about in the moonlight evenings than ever before; for
the boys were all too young to go with them except Hamish, and he was a
cripple, and not so well as usual this winter, and though the girls were
quite able to take care of themselves, they had little pleasure in going
alone. So Angus Dhu's girls used to take their knitting and their
sewing to the other house, and they all amused themselves in the
innocent, old-fashioned ways of that time.

Shenac seldom went to visit her cousins; for, besides the fact that her
father's house was the pleasantest meeting-place, her brother Hamish
could n