dly fever swept over the place, and my two sisters--the one
in her tenth, the other in her twelfth year--sank under it within a few
days of each other. Jean, the elder, who resided with my uncles, was a
pretty little girl, of fine intellect, and a great reader; Catherine,
the younger, was lively and affectionate, and a general favourite; and
their loss plunged the family in deep gloom. My uncles made little show
of grief, but they felt strongly: my mother for weeks and months wept
for her children, like Rachel of old, and refused to be comforted,
because they were not; but my grandfather, now in his eighty-fifth year,
seemed to be rendered wholly bankrupt in heart by their loss. As is
perhaps not uncommon in such cases, his warmer affections strode across
the generation of grown-up men and women--his sons and daughters--and
luxuriated among the children their descendants. The boys, his
grandsons, were too wild for him; but the two little girls--gentle and
affectionate--had seized on his whole heart; and now that they were
gone, it seemed as if he had nothing in the world left to care for. He
had been, up till this time, notwithstanding his great age, a hale and
active man. In 1803, when France threatened invasion, he was, though on
the verge of seventy, one of the first men in the place to apply for
arms as a volunteer; but now he drooped and gradually sunk, and longed
for the rest of the grave. "It is God's will," I heard him say about
this time, to a neighbour who congratulated him on his long term of life
and unbroken health--"It is God's will, but not my desire." And in
rather more than a twelvemonth after the death of my sisters, he was
seized by almost his only illness--for, for nearly seventy years he had
not been confined to bed for a single day--and was carried off in less
than a week. During the last few days, the fever under which he sank
mounted to his brain; and he talked in unbroken narrative of the events
of his past life. He began with his earliest recollections; described
the battle of Culloden as he had witnessed it from the Hill of Cromarty,
and the appearance of Duke William and the royal army as seen during a
subsequent visit to Inverness; ran over the after events of his
career--his marriage, his interviews with Donald Roy, his business
transactions with neighbouring proprietors, long dead at the time; and
finally, after reaching, in his oral history, his term of middle life,
he struck off into anoth