n a pleasing
consideration for the young lady, but that which follows is scarcely
less promising and agreeable.

"They [the Duke and Lord Islay] are both to speak of it to the King; but
Islay desired me to write to you, to know if there would be any fear of
a poursuit of adherence from that other person [the Dowager Lady Lovat],
which is a chimirical business, and tender fear for me in my dear Islay.
But when I told him that the lady denyed, before the Justice Court, that
I had anything to do with her, and that the pretended marriage is
declared nul (which Islay says should be done by the Commissarys only),
yet, when I told him that the witnesses were all dead who were at the
pretended marriage, he was satisfyed that they could make nothing of it,
though they would endeavour it."[210]

This letter, which shows in too clear colours how unscrupulous even men
of reputed honour, such as Lord Islay, were on some points in those
days, seems to have removed all obstacles; and, during the following
year (1717), Lord Lovat was united to Margaret Grant. Her father was the
head of a numerous and powerful clan, and this marriage tended greatly
to increase the influence of Lord Lovat among the Highlanders. Two
children, a son and a daughter, were the result of this union.
Prosperity once more shone upon the chieftain of the Frasers; and he now
restored to his home, Castle Downie, all the baronial state which must
so well have accorded with that ancient structure. The famous Sergeant
Macleod, in his Memoirs, gives a graphic account of his reception at
Castle Downie by Lord Lovat, where the old soldier repaired to seek a
commission in the celebrated Highland company, afterwards called the
Highland Watch.[211]

"At three o'clock," says the biographer of Macleod,[212] "on a summer's
morning, he set out on foot from Edinburgh; and about the same hour, on
the second day thereafter, he stood on the green of Castle Downie, Lord
Lovat's residence, about five or six miles beyond Inverness; having
performed in forty-eight hours a journey of a hundred miles and upwards,
and the greater part of it through a mountainous country. His sustenance
on this march was bread and cheese, with an onion, all which he carried
in his pocket, and a dram of whiskey at each of the three great stages
on the road,--and at Falkland, the half-way house between Edinburgh, by
the way of Kinghorn and Perth. He never went to bed during the whole of
this journey; thou