ld. He doubted not but that Willie Faa and his tribe were the
authors of all the evils which were besetting him: but he knew also
their power and their matchless craft, which rendered it almost
impossible either to detect or punish them. He had a favourite steed,
which had borne him in boyhood, and in battle when he served in foreign
wars, and one morning when he went into his park, he found it lying
bleeding upon the ground. Grief and indignation strove together in
arousing revenge within his bosom. He ordered his sluthhound to be
brought, and his dependants to be summoned together, and to bring arms
with them. He had previously observed foot-prints on the ground, and he
exclaimed--

"Now the fiend take the Faas, they shall find whose turn it is to rue
before the sun gae down."

The gong was pealed on the turrets of Clennel Hall, and the kempers with
their poles bounded in every direction, with the fleetness of mountain
stags, to summon all capable of bearing arms to the presence of the
laird. The mandate was readily obeyed; and within two hours thirty armed
men appeared in the park. The sluthhound was led to the footprint; and
after following it for many a weary mile over moss, moor, and mountain,
it stood and howled, and lashed its lips with its tongue, and again ran
as though its prey were at hand, as it approached what might be called a
gap in the wilderness between Keyheugh and Clovencrag.

Now, in the space between these desolate crags stood some score of
peels, or rather half hovels, half encampments--and this primitive city
in the wilderness was the capital of the Faa king's people.

"Now for vengeance!" exclaimed Clennel; and his desire of revenge was
excited the more from perceiving several of the choicest of his cattle,
which had disappeared, grazing before the doors or holes of the gipsy
village.

"Bring whins and heather," he continued--"pile them around it, and burn
the den of thieves to the ground."

His order was speedily obeyed, and when he commanded the trumpet to be
sounded, that the inmates might defend themselves if they dared, only
two or three men and women of extreme age, and some half-dozen children,
crawled upon their hands and knees from the huts--for it was impossible
to stand upright in them.

The aged men and women howled when they beheld the work of destruction
that was in preparation, and the children screamed when they heard them
howl. But the laird of Clennel had been injured,