thus in
our cave the old hunter's life; walking out at early mornings in the
adjacent parts of the wood for the wherewithal to breakfast; rounding
in the day with longer journeys in the moonlight, when the shadows were
crowded with the sounds of night bird and beast;--we might have been
happy, I say, but for thinking of our country's tribulation. Where were
our friends and neighbours? Who were yet among the living? How fared
our kin abroad in Cowal or fled farther south to the Rock of Dunbarton?
These restless thoughts came oftener to me than to my companions, and
many an hour I spent in woeful pondering in the alleys of the wood.

At last it seemed the Irish who held the town were in a sure way to
discover our hiding if we remained any longer there. Their provender was
running low, though they had driven hundreds of head of cattle before
them down the Glens; the weather hardened to frost again, and they were
pushing deeper into the wood to seek for bestial. It was full of animals
we dare not shoot, but which they found easy to the bullet; red-deer
with horns--even at three years old--stunted to knobs by a constant life
in the shade and sequestration of the trees they threaded their lives
through, or dun-bellied fallow-deer unable to face the blasts of the
exposed hills, light-coloured yeld hinds and hornless "heaviers" (or
winterers) the size of oxen. A flock or two of wild goat, even, lingered
on the upper slopes towards Ben Bhrec, and they were down now browsing
in the ditches beside the Marriage Tree.

We could see little companies of the enemy come closer and closer on
our retreat each day--attracted up the side of the hill from the road by
birds and beast that found cover under the young oaks.

"We'll have to be moving before long," said Sir Donald, ruefully looking
at them one day--so close at hand that we unwittingly had our fingers
round the dirk-hilts.

He had said the true word.

It was the very next day that an Irishman, bending under a bush to lift
a hedgehog that lay sleeping its winter sleep tightly rolled up in grass
and bracken, caught sight of the narrow entrance to our cave. Our eyes
were on him at the time, and when he came closer we fell back into
the rear of our dark retreat, thinking he might not push his inquiry
further.

For once John Splendid's cunning forsook him in the most ludicrous way.
"I could have stabbed him where he stood," he said afterwards, "for
I was in the shadow at his el