lowland troops took the invader behind. Montrose or the Mac Donalds
can't get through our passes."

"I'm not cock-sure of that, MacCailein," said Splendid. "We're here in
the bottom of an ashet; there's more than one deserter from your tartan
on the outside of it, and once they get on the rim they have, by all
rules strategic, the upper hand of us in some degree. I never had much
faith (if I dare make so free) in the surety of our retreat here. It's
an old notion of our grandads that we could bar the passes."

"So we can, sir, so we can!" said the Marquis, nervously picking at his
buttons with his long white fingers, the nails vexatiously polished and
shaped.

"Against horse and artillery, I allow, surely not against Gaelic foot.
This is not a wee foray of broken men, but an attack by an army of
numbers. The science of war--what little I learned of it in the Low
Countries with gentlemen esteemed my betters--convinces me that if a big
enough horde fall on from the rim of our ashet, as I call it, they might
sweep us into the loch like rattons."

I doubt MacCailein Mor heard little of this uncheery criticism, for he
was looking in a seeming blank abstraction out of the end window at the
town lights increasing in number as the minutes passed. His own piper in
the close behind the buttery had tuned up and into the gathering--

"Bha mi air banais 'am bail' Inneraora. Banais bu mhiosa bha riamh air
an t-saoghal!"

I felt the tune stir me to the core, and M'Iver, I could see by the
twitch of his face, kindled to the old call.

"Curse them!" cried MacCailein; "Curse them!" he cried in the Gaelic,
and he shook a white fist foolishly at the north; "I'm wanting but peace
and my books. I keep my ambition in leash, and still and on they must be
snapping like curs at Argile. God's name! and I'll crush them like ants
on the ant-heap."

From the door at the end of the room, as he stormed, a little bairn
toddled in, wearing a night-shirt, a curly gold-haired boy with his
cheeks like the apple for hue, the sleep he had risen from still heavy
on his eyes. Seemingly the commotion had brought him from his bed, and
up he now ran, and his little arms went round his father's knees. On
my word I've seldom seen a man more vastly moved than was Archibald,
Marquis of Argile. He swallowed his spittle as if it were wool, and took
the child to his arms awkwardly, like one who has none of the handling
of his own till they are grown up, and I