strange and mystic figures; and the ceremony of binding was accompanied by words of Druidical origin; but Mhari was sorely perplexed and bewildered when the wife of Gillespie Ruadh expired amid the tempest, with this ancient girdle of maternity around her.

In a revengeful spirit, that bordered on the necromantic malevolence of the olden time, she fashioned an image of clay, which she named Ephraim Snaggs,' and selecting a time when the moon was full, placed it in a runnel which distilled between the rocks from a lonely tarn, among the sedges of which the dusky water-ouzel laid its eggs, and where the lazy bittern, whose croak forebodes a storm, made its home; and she believed that as the stream washed away the clay, and reduced it to a shapeless mass, and from thence to mere mud, so would the ungainly person of Mr. Ephraim Snaggs waste, pine, and decay: but most unfortunately, and greatly to the injury of Mhari's local reputation, this incantation of the nineteenth century turned out a complete failure; for though the runnel washed away the image in less than three days, Snaggs remained unharmed and well as ever; for we frequently saw him trotting his pony along the mountain path which led to the house of Sir Horace Everingham.

Though supported by the secret charity of the neighbouring clachans, our poor people were meanwhile enduring great misery. Their nights were passed shelterless among the dreary shades of the dead-each mother with her children clinging round her in terror and hunger; for their principal sustenance had been herbs, mountain-berries, and cold

water.

Each morning they thanked God that another night was past; and each night they thanked Him for the sorrowful day that was gone. The wind whistled drearily from the ocean round the open ruins, and

L

over the long grassy graves, and bare, bleak headland of St. Colme. It seemed to bear on its breath a wailing sound, like a dirge of the dying, as it swept through the old yew-trees-but this, of course, was fancy.

With a heart that vibrated between love and hatred, anger and sorrow, I thought of Laura Everingham.

If the regret she expressed so prettily and so pithily for her father's previous severity and his factor's cruelty was sincere, what would her emotions be now?

But days passed away, and no message from he ever reached me at that wretched hut, which the poor but hospitable priest had invited me to share. This neglect stung me to the soul, and caused an anger that not even the memory of Laura's winning kindness, the strange admissions of Snobleigh in the avenue, and the memory of her soft smile or the beauty of her person could subdue; but I knew not that during this, our time of calamity, she and Fanny Clavering were paying a visit to a noble marquis, whose exterminating propensities have made him famous as one of the chief Barriers to the prosperity of Scotland.'

Meanwhile Sir Horace, Sheriff Mac Fee, and Mr. Snaggs, after a voluminous correspondence with the Board of Supervision, had a steamer despatched to Loch Ora, to convey our people to Glasgow, where (without being landed) they were to be thrust like slaves on board of a vessel bound for America. Their final expatriation was fully resolved on by the trio; and none of the evicted were consulted either as to their wishes or destination, as they were alleged to be poor and ignorant Celts, who knew no language but their native Gaelic, and were helpless and stricken alike by poverty, sickness, and a wholesome terror of the powers that be.

The night was pitchy dark and somewhat stormy, when our poor outcasts saw the steamer that was to convey them for ever from their loved Highland home, ploughing the lonely waters of the deep salt loch that opened into the mountains; and a wail of despair ascended from the bleak burial promontory, as they heard the roar of the escaping steam, and the plunge of the descending anchor, when the vessel came to her moorings. Then the red light at her mast-head was watched for hours by the doomed and expatriated clansmen with emotions which no pen can describe, or pencil portray.

On this night it was averred that the white stag had been seen to hover near us in the gloom.

Low down along the base of Ben Ora, round the shore of the mirrored loch, and in the dark glen they had left, our people saw a wondrous blaze of light that illuminated the sky-that tinged the clouds with wavering fire, and lit the cold grey rocks and hillsthe waving woods, and ghastly corries. It widened and grew on every hand, that marvellous sheet of flame, seeming to embrace the whole country in its fiery grasp; and with shouts of fear and wonder, the poor people, while gazing on this phenomenon, forgot for a time their own sorrows, and the approaching hour of their final expatriation.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE HEATHER ON FIRE!

On this night Callum and I were loitering in the glen, among the ruins of our once-peaceful and contented mountain hamlet; but oppressed by sadness, on witnessing the new desolation of the place, we

wandered three or four miles away, and there older scenes of barbarity awaited us.

We sat down on some piles of stones that were half shrouded by the rising dog-grass, the moss, and the long feathery bracken. These marked the site of a few huts. Here once dwelt a brave little community named the Mac Ellars, one of whom had been my tutor, and here I had attended his little school, bringing each day with me, like other boys, a peat, as a contribution to his fire; for this is the old Highland custom, and the urchin who failed to do so was denied the privilege of warming his kilted legs for that day. Here often had I played the truant, and been threatened by my mother with the Druid-that venerable bugbear of the Highland urchin.

The Mac Ellars were all brave and hardy men, whose progenitors had occupied their holdings since the days of Lachlan Mohr; and it was with them that Callum made the famous riot in Glen Ora, when burning the effigies of a certain English historian, and his miserable Scottish imitator, for their falsehoods and absurd antipathy to the clansmen and their national characteristics. But the youth of the clachan, twelve sturdy young lads, had been cajoled by a noble marquis and the duchess, his mother, into the ranks of the Sutherland Highlanders, and had marched to fight the Russians: then their cottages were levelled, and their aged parents were driven forth to beg, to starve, or die-tidings, no doubt, but ill-calculated to rouse the patriotism or fan the amor patriæ of the poor Celtic soldier, when chewing his green coffee in the frozen trenches of Sebastopol, or sinking under disease, with other victims of treachery and mismanagement, in the frightful hospital at Scutari; but fortunately for our Government, the poor clansman is animated by a love of home, which neither time can efface nor tyranny destroy. Thus were the Mac Ellars rooted out-the young sent to storm Sebas

topol-the old to starve in the Lowlands, while the marquis and his passé mother were in a state of fervid Uncle Tommery, and, inspired by Mrs. Stowe's romance, were the leaders and patrons of anti-slavery meetings in the South, and fustian addresses to the women of America.

The ruined cottages which are met with at every few miles, amid the depopulated portions of our Highlands, dotting those vast glens which are silent and voiceless now as the most savage wilds of Hudson's Bay, or the great desert of Zahara, are well calculated to excite emotions of melancholy, as being the last relics of an old and departed race.

The wild gooseberry-bushes straggling among the stones; the old well, half choked by sand or weeds; the half-flattened fences; the garden-flowers growing rank among the encroaching heather, all told us the usual melancholy tale; and Callum and I sat in silence on the mossy stones, watching the daylight dying away beyond the distant sea, and full of our own sad and bitter thoughts.

He seemed wholly intent on polishing the butt of a steel Highland pistol, and while he did so, there hovered a dark and sombre aspect of ferocity on his brow.

We were silent, I have said, for both were too much oppressed to speak. Suddenly a black cock appeared on a fragment of rock near us, and clapped his wings as if in defiance. Quick as lightning Callum levelled the pistol and shot him dead; a moment the outstpread pinions beat the heather, and then lay still, while the pistol-shot was pealing among the echoes of the wilderness. My fosterer leisurely reloaded and brought the bird to me; it was large, weighing more than five pounds, its sable plumage glazed all over with a shining blue, and its stomach gorged with bilberries.

'I hope the report may not reach the ear of some