nce as we went among
them in the morning. Glenurchy at its foot was wailing with one loud
unceasing coronach made up of many lamentations, for no poor croft, no
keep, no steading in all the countryside almost, but had lost its man at
Inverlochy. It was terrible to hear those sounds and see those sights
of frantic women setting every thought of life aside to give themselves
wholly to their epitaphs for the men who would come no more.

For ordinary our women keen but when they are up in years and without
the flowers of the cheek that the salt tear renders ugly; women who have
had good practice with grief, who are so far off from the fore-world
of childhood where heaven is about the dubs of the door that they find
something of a dismal pleasure in making wails for a penny or two or a
cogie of soldier's brose. They would as soon be weeping as singing; have
you not seen them hurrying to the hut to coronach upon a corpse,
with the eager step of girls going to the last dance of the harvest?
Beldames, witches, I hate your dirges, that are but an old custom of
lamentation! But Glenurchy and Lochow to-day depended for their sorrow
upon no hired mourners, upon no aged play-actors at the passion of
grief; cherry-cheeked maidens wept as copiously as their grand-dames,
and so this universal coronach that rose and fell on the wind round by
Stronmealchan and Inish-trynich, and even out upon the little isles that
snuggle in the shadow of Cruachan Ben, had many an unaccustomed note;
many a cry of anguish from the deepest well of sorrow came to the ear.
To walk by a lake and hear griefs chant upon neighbouring isles is
the chief of the Hundred Dolours. Of itself it was enough to make us
melancholy and bitter, but it was worse to see in the faces of old women
and men who passed us surly on the road, the grudge that we had been
spared, we gentlemen in the relics of fine garments, while their own
lads had been taken. It was half envy that we, and not their own,
still lived, and half anger that we had been useless in preventing
the slaughter of their kinsmen. As we walked in their averted or surly
looks, we had no heart to resent them, for was it not human nature? Even
when a very old crooked man with a beard like the foam of the linn, and
eyes worn deep in their black sockets by constant staring upon care, and
through the black mystery of life, stood at his door among his wailing
daughters, and added to his rhyming a scurrilous verse whereof