r returns, and he himself was not young. The little church or
chapel in which the marriage had been celebrated was a ruin--it had been
burned to the ground, whether as part price of the terrible feud or not,
no one could say; the priest was dead, or gone none knew whither; and old
Mawsie, a beldame, lived in the cottage that had once been the Catholic
manse.

Those were wild and strange times altogether in this part of the Scottish
Highlands, and law was oftentimes the property of might rather than
right.

At the time, then, our story really opens, my father had lived in the
castle and ruled in the glens for many a long year. I was the first-born,
next came Donald, then Dugald, and last of all our one sister Flora.

What a happy life was ours in Glen Coila, till the cloud arose on our
horizon, which, gathering force amain, burst in storm at last over our
devoted heads!

CHAPTER II.

OUR BOYHOOD'S LIFE.

On our boyhood's life--that, I mean, of my brothers and myself--I must
dwell no longer than the interest of our strange story demands, for our
chapters must soon be filled with the relation of events and adventures
far more stirring than anything that happened at home in our day.

And yet no truer words were ever spoken than these--'the boy is father of
the man.' The glorious battle of Waterloo--Wellington himself told us--was
won in the cricket field at home. And in like manner our greatest pioneers
of civilisation, our most successful emigrants, men who have often
literally to lash the rifle to the plough stilts, as they cultivate and
reclaim the land of the savage, have been made and manufactured, so to
speak, in the green valleys of old England, and on the hills and moors of
bonnie Scotland.

Probably the new M'Crimman of Coila, as my father was called on the lake
side and in the glens, had mingled more, far more, in life than any chief
who had ever reigned before him. He would not have been averse to drawing
the sword in his country's cause, had it been necessary, but my brothers
and I were born in peaceful times, shortly after the close of the war with
Russia. No, my father could have drawn the claymore, but he could also use
the ploughshare--and did.

There were at first grumblers in the clans, who lamented the advent of
anything that they were pleased to call new-fangled. Men there were who
wished to live as their forefathers had done in the 'good old
times'--cultivate only the tops of the 'rig