for their lives before the troops of a ruthless
invader, we see with how much of the terrible the imagination of a poet
could invest the evils of war, when aggravated by pitiless barbarity.
Fertile as that imagination was, however, there might be found new
circumstances to heighten the horrors of the scene--circumstances
beyond the reach of invention--in the retreat of the Sutherland
Highlanders from the smoking ruins of their cottages to their
allotments on the coast. We have heard of one man, named M'Kay, whose
family, at the time of the greater conflagration referred to by
M'Leod, were all lying ill of fever, who had to carry two of his sick
children on his back a distance of twenty-five miles. We have heard of
the famished people blackening the shores, like the crew of some vessel
wrecked on an inhospitable coast, that they might sustain life by
the shell-fish and sea-weed laid bare by the ebb. Many of their
allotments, especially on the western coast, were barren in the
extreme--unsheltered by bush or tree, and exposed to the sweeping
sea-winds, and, in time of tempest, to the blighting spray; and it was
found a matter of the extremest difficulty to keep the few cattle
which they had retained, from wandering, especially in the night-time,
into the better sheltered and more fertile interior. The poor
animals were intelligent enough to read a practical comment on the
nature of the change effected; and, from the harshness of the
shepherds to whom the care of the interior had been entrusted, they
served materially to add to the distress of their unhappy masters.
They were getting continually impounded; and vexatious fines, in the
form of trespass-money, came thus to be wrung from the already
impoverished Highlanders. Many who had no money to give were obliged
to relieve them by depositing some of their few portable articles of
value, such as bed or body clothes, or, more distressing still,
watches and rings and pins--the only relics, in not a few instances, of
brave men whose bones were mouldering under the fatal rampart at New
Orleans, or in the arid sands of Egypt--on that spot of proud
recollection, where the invincibles of Napoleon went down before the
Highland bayonet. Their first efforts as fishermen were what might
be expected from a rural people unaccustomed to the sea. The shores of
Sutherland, for immense tracts together, are iron-bound, and much
exposed--open on the eastern coast to the waves of the German Oc