air, to go where you would and find bairns toddling on the braes
or singing women bent to the peat-creel and the reaping-hook.

In that autumn I think nature gave us her biggest cup brimmingly, and my
father, as he watched his servants binding corn head high, said he
had never seen the like before. In the hazel-woods the nuts bent the
branches, so thick were they, so succulent; the hip and the haw, the
blaeberry and the rowan, swelled grossly in a constant sun; the orchards
of the richer folks were in a revelry of fruit Somehow the winter
grudged, as it were, to come. For ordinary, October sees the trees that
beard Dun-chuach and hang for miles on the side of Creag Dubh searing
and falling below the frost; this season the cold stayed aloof long, and
friendly winds roved from the west and south. The forests gleamed in a
golden fire that only cooled to darkness when the firs, my proud tall
friends, held up their tasselled heads in unquenching green. Birds
swarmed in the heather, and the sides of the bare hills moved constantly
with deer. Never a stream in all real Argile but boiled with fish; you
came down to Eas-a-chleidh on the Aora with a creel and dipped it into
the linn to bring out salmon rolling with fat.

All this I dwell on for a sensible purpose, though it may seem to be
but an old fellow's boasting and a childish vanity about my own
calf-country. 'Tis the picture I would paint--a land laughing and
content, well governed by Gillesbeg, though Gruamach he might be by name
and by nature. Fourpence a-day was a labourer's wage, but what need had
one of even fourpence, with his hut free and the food piling richly at
his very door?

CHAPTER VI.--MY LADY OF MOODS.

On the 27th of July in this same year 1644 we saw his lordship and his
clan march from Inneraora to the dreary north. By all accounts (brought
in to the Marquis by foot-runners from the frontier of Lorn), the
Irishry of Colkitto numbered no more than 1200, badly armed with old
matchlocks and hampered by two or three dozen camp-women bearing the
bairns of this dirty regiment at their breasts. Add to this as many
Highlanders under Montrose and his cousin Para Dubh of Inchbrackie, and
there was but a force of 3500 men for the good government of Argile to
face. But what were they? If the Irish were poorly set up in weapons the
Gaels were worse. On the spring before, Gillesbeg had harried Athole,
and was cunning enough to leave its armouries as bare as th