ay and a night in the camp between Aora
river and the deep wood of Tarradubh. The plain hummed with our little
army, where now are but the nettle and the ivied tower, and the yellow
bee booming through the solitude; morning and night the shrill of the
_piob-mhor_ rang cheerily to the ear of Dun-chuach; the sharp call of
the chieftains and sergeants, the tramp of the brogued feet in their
simple evolutions, the clatter of arms, the contention and the laughing,
the song, the reprimand, the challenge, the jest,--all these were
pleasant to me.

One morning I got up from a bed of gall or bog-myrtle I shared with John
Splendid after a late game of chess, and fared out on a little eminence
looking over the scene. Not a soldier stirred in his plaid; the army was
drugged by the heavy fir-winds from the forest behind. The light of the
morning flowed up wider and whiter from the Cowal hills, the birds woke
to a rain of twittering prayer among the bushes ere ever a man stirred
more than from side to side to change his dream. It was the most
melancholy hour I ever experienced, and I have seen fields in the wan
morning before many a throng and bloody day. I felt "fey," as we say at
home--a premonition that here was no conquering force, a sorrow for the
glens raped of their manhood, and hearths to be desolate. By-and-by the
camp moved into life, Dun-barton's drums beat the reveille, the pipers
arose, doffed their bonnets to the sun, and played a rouse; my gloom
passed like a mist from the mountains.

They went north by the Aora passes into the country of Bredalbane, and
my story need not follow them beyond.

Inneraora burghers went back to their commercial affairs, and I went
to Glen Shira to spend calm days on the river and the hill. My father
seemed to age perceptibly, reflecting on his companion gone, and he
clung to me like the _crotal_ to the stone. Then it was (I think) that
some of the sobriety of life first came to me, a more often cogitation
and balancing of affairs. I began to see some of the tanglement of
nature, and appreciate the solemn mystery of our travel across this
vexed and care-warped world. Before, I was full of the wine of youth,
giving doubt of nothing a lodgment in my mind, acting ever on the
impulse, sucking the lemon, seeds and all, and finding it unco sappy and
piquant to the palate. To be face to face day after day with this old
man's grief, burdened with his most apparent double love, conscious that
I w