gray head that was so much respected as my father's. Oh, I wish, I wish they had continued friends!"

“And did you ever see this Mr. Mac-Ivor, if that be his name, Miss Bradwardine?

No, that is not his name; and he would consider master as a sort of affront, only that you are an Englishman, and know no better. But the Lowlanders call him, like other gentlemen, by the name of his estate, Glennaquoich; and the Highlanders call him Vich Ian Vohr,- that is, the son of John the Great; and we upon the braes here call him by both names indifferently."

"I am afraid I shall never bring my English tongue to call him by either one or other.

"But he is a very polite, handsome man," continued Rose, "and his sister Flora is one of the most beautiful and accomplished young ladies in this country; she was bred in a convent in France, and was a great friend of mine before this unhappy dispute. Dear Captain Waverley, try your influence with my father to make matters up. I am sure this is but the beginning of our troubles; for Tully-Veolan has never been a safe or quiet residence when we have been at feud with the Highlanders. When I was a girl about ten, there was a 'skirmish fought between a party of twenty of them, and my father and his servants, behind the Mains; and the bullets broke several panes in the north windows, they were so near. Three of the Highlanders were killed, and they brought them in wrapped in their plaids, and laid them on the stone floor of the hall; and next morning their wives and daughters came, clapping their hands and crying the coronach, and shrieking, and car

ried away the dead bodies, with the pipes playing before them. I could not sleep for six weeks without starting, and thinking I heard these terrible cries, and saw the bodies lying on the steps, all stiff and swathed up in their bloody tartans. But since that time there came a party from the garrison at Stirling, with a warrant from the Lord Justice Clerk, or some such great man, and took away all our arms; and now, how are we to protect ourselves if they come down in any strength?"

Waverley could not help starting at a story which bore so much resemblance to one of his own day-dreams. Here was a girl scarce seventeen, the gentlest of her sex both in temper and appearance, who had witnessed with her own eyes such a scene as he had used to conjure up in his imagination as only occurring in ancient times, and spoke of it coolly, as one very likely to recur. He felt at once the impulse of curiosity, and that slight sense of danger which only serves to heighten its interest. He might have said, with Malvolio, "I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me!' I am actually in the land of military and romantic adventures, and it only remains to be seen what will be my own share in them."

The whole circumstances now detailed concerning the state of the country, seemed equally novel' and extraordinary. He had indeed often heard of Highland thieves, but had no idea of the systematic mode in which their depredations were conducted, and that the practice was connived at, and even encouraged, by many of the Highland chieftains, who not only found the creaghs, or forays, useful for the purpose of training individuals of their clan to the practice of arms, but also of

maintaining a wholesome terror among their Lowland neighbours, and levying, as we have seen, a tribute from them, under colour of protectionmoney.

Bailie Macwheeble, who soon afterwards entered, expatiated still more at length upon the same topic. This honest gentleman's conversation was so formed upon his professional practice that Davie Gellatley once said his discourse was like a "charge of horning." He assured our hero that " from the maist ancient times of record, the lawless thieves, limmers, and broken men of the Highlands had been in fellowship together by reason of their surnames, for the committing of divers thefts, reifs, and herships upon the honest men of the Low Country, when they not only intromitted with their whole. goods and gear, corn, cattle, horse, nolt, sheep, outsight and insight plenishing, at their wicked. pleasure, but moreover made prisoners, ransomed them, or concussed them into giving borrows [pledges] to enter into captivity again,—all which was directly prohibited in divers parts of the Statute Book, both by the act one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven, and various others; the whilk statutes, with all that had followed and might follow thereupon, were shamefully broken and vilipended by the said sornars, limmers, and broken men, associated into fellowships, for the aforesaid purposes of theft, stouthreef, fire-raising, murther, raptus mulierum, or forcible abduction of women, and such like as aforesaid. "

It seemed like a dream to Waverley that these deeds of violence should be familiar to men's minds, and currently talked of, as falling within the common order of things, and happening daily

1

in the immediate vicinity, without his having crossed the seas, and while he was yet in the otherwise well-ordered island of Great Britain. 1

1 Mac-Donald of Barrisdale, one of the very last Highland gentlemen who carried on the plundering system to any great extent, was a scholar and a well-bred gentleman. He engraved on his broadswords the well-known lines,

Hæ tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.

Indeed, the levying of blackmail was, before the 1745, practised by several chiefs of very high rank, who in doing so contended that they were lending the laws the assistance of their arms and swords, and affording a protection which could not be obtained from the magistracy in the disturbed state of the country. The author has seen a Memoir of Mac-Pherson of Cluny, chief of that ancient clan, from which it appears that he levied protection-money to a very large amount, which was willingly paid even by some of his most powerful neighbours. A gentleman of this clan, hearing a clergyman hold forth to his congregation on the crime of theft, interrupted the preacher to assure him he might leave the enforcement of such doctrines to Cluny Mac-Pherson, whose broadsword would put a stop to theft sooner than all the sermons of all the ministers of the Synod.

CHAPTER XVI.

AN UNEXPECTED ALLY APPEARS.

THE Baron returned at the dinner-hour, and had in a great measure recovered his composure and good-humour. He not only confirmed the stories which Edward had heard from Rose and Bailie Macwheeble, but added many anecdotes from his own experience concerning the state of the Highlands and their inhabitants. The chiefs he pronounced to be, in general, gentlemen of great honour and high pedigree, whose word was accounted as a law by all those of their own sept, or clan. "It did not indeed," he said, "become them, as had occurred in late instances, to propone their prosapia, a lineage which rested for the most part on the vain and fond rhymes of their Seannachies, or Bhairds, as æquiponderate with the evidence of ancient characters and royal grants of antiquity, conferred upon distinguished houses in the Low Country by divers Scottish monarchs; nevertheless, such was their outrecuidance and presumption as to undervalue those who possessed such evidents, as if they held their lands in a sheep's skin."

This, by the way, pretty well explained the cause of quarrel between the Baron and his Highland ally. But he went on to state so many curious particulars concerning the manners, customs, and