s, the Counsel (all but the convict's
lawyers--a lot of disaffected Jacobites, who took their food by
themselves at the inn, and brusquely refused his Grace's hospitality),
the magistracy, and some county friends, to a late dinner at the castle
that night, and an hour after saw them round the ducal board.

If Count Victor was astonished at the squalid condition of things in the
castle of the poor Baron of Doom, he would have been surprised to find
here, within an hour or two's walk of it, so imposing and luxuriant a
domesticity. Many lands, many hands, great wealth won by law, battle,
and the shrewdness of generations, enabled Argyll to give his castle
grandeur and his table the opulence of any southern palace. And it was a
bright company that sat about his board, with several ladies in it, for
his duchess loved to have her sojourn in her Highland home made gay by
the company of young women who might by their beauty and light hearts
recall her own lost youth.

A bagpipe stilled in the hall, a lute breathed a melody from a
neighbouring room, the servants in claret and yellow livery noiselessly
served wine.

Elchies sourly pursed his lips over his liquor, to the mingled amusement
and vexation of his Grace, who knew his lordship's cellar, or even the
Justiciary Vault in the town (for the first act of the Court had been
to send down bins from Edinburgh for their use on circuit), contained
no vintage half so good, and "Your Grace made reference on the way up to
some one killed in the neighbourhood," he said, as one resuming a topic
begun elsewhere.

"Not six miles from where we sit," replied the Duke, his cultivated
English accent in a strong contrast with the broad burr of the Edinburgh
justiciar, "and scarcely a day before you drove past. The man shot, so
far as we have yet learned, was a Macfarlane, one of a small but ancient
and extremely dishonest clan whose country used to be near the head of
Loch Lomond. Scarcely more than half a hundred of them survive, but
they give us considerable trouble, for they survive at the cost of their
neighbour's gear and cattle. They are robbers and footpads, and it looks
as if the fatality to one of their number near Doom has been incurred
during a raid. We still have our raids, Lord Elchies, in spite of what
you were saying on the bench as to the good example this part of the
country sets the rest of the Highlands--not the raids of old fashion,
perhaps, but more prosaic, simply thef