A parish visit, is it, sir?" asked John, still in his irony.

The minister sat him down on a log of wood and clutched his side, still
pointing eagerly to the south of our fort No one could understand him,
but at last he found a choked and roupy voice.

"A band behind there," he said; "your--front--attack is--but--a--feint"

As he spoke, half-a-dozen men in a north-country tartan got on the top
of our low rear wall that we thought impregnable on the lip of the hill,
and came on us with a most ferocious uproar. "Badenoch!" they cried in
a fashion to rend the hills, and the signal (for such it was more than
slogan) brought on our other side the Clanranald gentry.

What followed in that hearthstone fight so hot and brisk took so short
a space of time, and happened in so confused and terrible a moment,
that all but my personal feeling escapes me. My every sense stirred
with something horrible--the numb sound of a musket-butt on a head,
the squeal of men wounded at the vitals, and the deeper roar of hate;
a smell of blood as I felt it when a boy holding the candle at night to
our shepherds slaughtering sheep in the barn at home; before the eyes a
red blur cleared at intervals when I rubbed the stinging sweat from my
face.

Half a hundred of those back-gait assailants were over our low wall with
their axe-hooks and ladders before we could charge and prime, engaging
us hand to hand in the cobbled square of our fort, at the tower foot.
The harassment on this new side gave the first band of the enemy the
chance to surmount our front wall, and they were not slow to take it.

Luckily our halberdiers stood firm in a mass that faced both ways,
and as luckily, we had in Master John M'Iver a general of strategy and
experience.

"Stand fast, Campbell Halberdiers!" he cried. "It's bloody death,
whether we take it like cravens or Gaelic gentlemen!" He laid about him
with a good purpose, and whether they tried us in front or rear, the
scamps found the levelled pikes and the ready swords. Some dropped
beside, but more dropped before us, for the tod in a hole will face
twenty times what he will flee from in the open wood, but never a man
of all our striving company fought sturdier than our minister, with a
weapon snatched from an Athole man he had levelled at a first blow from
an oaken rung.

"The sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" he would cry; "for all the
kings of the Amorites that dwell in the mountains are gathered together
agai