their freedom." [216] His tacksmen
and people understood him, and repaired by hundreds to the Sheriff to
take the oaths. The Macdonalds of Sleat, Clanronald, Keppoch, and
even Glengarry, imitated the Camerons; and the chiefs, after trying to
outstay each other as long as they durst, imitated their vassals.

The thirty-first of December arrived; and still the Macdonalds of
Glencoe had not come in. The punctilious pride of Mac Ian was doubtless
gratified by the thought that he had continued to defy the government
after the boastful Glengarry, the ferocious Keppoch, the magnanimous
Lochiel had yielded: but he bought his gratification dear.

At length, on the thirty-first of December, he repaired to Fort William,
accompanied by his principal vassals, and offered to take the oaths. To
his dismay he found that there was in the fort no person competent to
administer them. Colonel Hill, the Governor, was not a magistrate;
nor was there any magistrate nearer than Inverary. Mac Ian, now fully
sensible of the folly of which he had been guilty in postponing to the
very last moment an act on which his life and his estate depended, set
off for Inverary in great distress. He carried with him a letter from
Hill to the Sheriff of Argyleshire, Sir Colin Campbell of Ardkinglass, a
respectable gentleman, who, in the late reign, had suffered severely for
his Whig principles. In this letter the Colonel expressed a goodnatured
hope that, even out of season, a lost sheep, and so fine a lost sheep,
would be gladly received. Mac Ian made all the haste in his power, and
did not stop even at his own house, though it lay nigh to the road. But
at that time a journey through Argyleshire in the depth of winter was
necessarily slow. The old man's progress up steep mountains and along
boggy valleys was obstructed by snow storms; and it was not till
the sixth of January that he presented himself before the Sheriff at
Inverary. The Sheriff hesitated. His power, he said, was limited by the
terms of the proclamation, and he did not see how he could swear a
rebel who had not submitted within the prescribed time. Mac Ian begged
earnestly and with tears that he might be sworn. His people, he said,
would follow his example. If any of them proved refractory, he would
himself send the recusant to prison, or ship him off for Islanders. His
entreaties and Hill's letter overcame Sir Colin's scruples. The oath
was administered; and a certificate was transmitted to th