had a hollow heart Here was our refuge, and
the dry and stoury alleys of the fir-wood we had traversed gave no clue
of our track to them that might hunt us.

We made a fire whose smoke curled out at the back of the cave into a
linn at the bottom of a fall the Cromalt burn has here, and had there
been any to see the reek they would have thought it but the finer spray
of the thawed water rising among the melting ice-lances. We made, too,
couches of fir-branches--the springiest and most wholesome of beds in
lieu of heather or gall, and laid down our weariness as a soldier would
relinquish his knapsack, after John Splendid had bandaged my wounded
shoulder.

In the cave of Eas-a-chosain we lay for more days than I kept count
of, I immovable, fevered with my wound, Sir Donald my nurse, and John
Splendid my provider. They kept keen scrutiny on the road below, where
sometimes they could see the invaders passing in bands in their search
for scattered townships or crofts.

On the second night John ventured into the edge of the town to see how
fared Inneraora and to seek provand. He found the place like a fiery
cross,--burned to char at the ends, and only the mid of it--the solid
Tolbooth and the gentle houses--left to hint its ancient pregnancy. A
corps of Irish had it in charge while their comrades scoured the rest of
the country, and in the dusk John had an easy task to find brandy in the
cellars of Craig-nure (the invaders never thought of seeking a cellar
for anything more warming than peats), a boll of meal in handfuls here
and there among the meal-girnels of the commoner houses that lay open to
the night, smelling of stale hearth-fires, and harried.

To get fresh meat was a matter even easier, though our guns we dare
not be using, for there were blue hares to snare, and they who have not
taken fingers to a roasted haunch of badger harried out of his hiding
with a club have fine feeding yet to try. The good Gaelic soldier will
eat, sweetly, crowdy made in his brogue--how much better off were we
with the stout and well-fired oaten cakes that this Highland gentleman
made on the flagstone in front of our cave-fire!

Never had a wounded warrior a more rapid healing than I. "_Ruigidh an
ro-ghiullach air an ro-ghalar_"--good nursing will overcome the worst
disease, as our antique proverb says, and I had the best of nursing and
but a baggage-master's wound after all. By the second week I was hale
and hearty. We were not uncomf