e of the loch, that in the clarity of the air
seemed but a mile off. Behind them went skulking foxes, pole-cats,
badgers, cowering hares, and bead-eyed weasels. They seemed to have
a premonition that Famine was stalking behind them, and they fled our
luckless woods and fields like rats from a sinking ship.

To Master Gordon I said one morning as we watched a company of dun
heifers mid-way on the loch, "This is an ill omen or I'm sore mistaken."

He was not a man given to superstitions, but he could not gainsay me.
"There's neither hip nor haw left in our woods," he said; "birds
I've never known absent here in the most eager winters are gone, and
wild-eyed strangers, their like never seen here before, tamely pick
crumbs at my very door. Signs! signs! It beats me sometimes to know how
the brute scents the circumstance to come, but--whats the Word?--'Not
a sparrow shall fall.'"

We fed well on the wild meat driven to our fireside, and to it there
never seemed any end, for new flocks took up the tale of the old ones,
and a constant procession of fur and feather moved across our white
prospect. Even the wolf--from Benderloch no doubt--came baying at night
at the empty gibbets at the town-head, that spoke of the law's suspense.

Only in Castle Inneraora was there anything to be called gaiety.
MacCailein fumed at first at the storm that kept his letters from him
and spoiled the laburnums and elms he was coaxing to spring about his
garden; but soon he settled down to his books and papers, ever his
solace in such homely hours as the policy and travel of his life
permitted. And if the burgh was dull and dark, night after night there
was merriment over the drawbrig of the castle. It would be on the 10th
or the 15th of the month that I first sampled it I went up with a party
from the town and neighbourhood, with their wives and daughters, finding
an atmosphere wondrous different from that of the cooped and anxious
tenements down below. Big logs roared behind the fire-dogs, long candles
and plenty lit the hall, and pipe and harp went merrily. Her ladyship
had much of the French manner--a dainty dame with long thin face and
bottle shoulders, attired always in Saxon fashion, and indulgent in
what I then thought a wholesome levity, that made up for the Gruamach
husband. And she thought him, honestly, the handsomest and noblest
in the world, though she rallied him for his overmuch sobriety of
deportment. To me she was very gracious,