mother of muskets in train."

But, fortunately for us, no artillery ever came to Duntorvil.

Fully two hundred of the enemy massed on the hill, commanded by a squat
officer in breeks and wearing a peruke _Anglice_, that went oddly with
his tartan plaid. He was the master of Clanranald, we learned anon, a
cunning person, whose aim was to avail himself of the impetuousness
of the kilts he had in his corps. Gaels on the attack, as he knew, are
omnipotent as God's thunderbolts: give them a running start at a foe,
with no waiting, and they might carry the gates of hell against the
Worst One and all his clan; on a standing defence where coolness and
discipline are wanted they have less splendid virtues. Clanranald was
well aware that to take his regiment all into the hollow where his
scout was stiffening was not only to expose them to the fire of the fort
without giving them any chance of quick reply, but to begin the siege
off anything but the bounding shoe-sole the Highlander has the natural
genius for. What he devised was to try musketry at long range (and to
shorten my tale, that failed), then charge from his summit, over the
rushy gut, and up the side of Dunchuach, disconcerting our aim and
bringing his men in on their courageous heat.

We ran back our pieces through the gorge of the bastions, wheeled them
in on the terre-plein back from the wall, and cocked them higher on
their trunnions to get them in train for the opposite peak.

"Boom!" went the first gun, and a bit of brown earth spat up to the left
of the enemy, low by a dozen paces.

A silly patter of poor musketry made answer, but their bullets might as
well have been aimed at snipe for all the difference it made to us: they
came short or spattered against our wall. We could hear the shouts of
the foe, and saw their confusion as our third gun sent its message into
the very heart of them.

Then they charged Dunchuach.

Our artillery lost its value, and we met them with fusil and caliver.

They came on in a sort of echelon of four companies, close ordered, and
not as a more skilly commander would make them, and the leading company
took the right. The rushy grass met them with a swish as they bounded
over it like roebucks, so fast that our few score of muskets made no
impression on them until they were climbing up the steep brae that led
to our walls.

Over a man in a minority, waiting, no matter how well ensconced, the
onslaught of numbers carried on th