e wings of hate, there comes a strange
feeling--I'll never deny it--a sort of qualm at the pit of the stomach,
a notion to cry parley or turn a tail disgraceful. I felt it but for a
second, and then I took to my old practice of making a personal foe of
one particular man in front of me. This time I chose a lieutenant or
sergeant of the MacDonalds (by his tartan), a tall lean rascal, clean
shaved, in trews and a tight-fitting _cota gearr_ or short coat, with an
otter-skin cap on his head, the otter-tail still attached and dangling
behind like a Lowlander's queue. He was striding along zealfully,
brandishing his sword, and disdaining even to take off his back the
bull-hide targe, though all his neighbours kept theirs in front of them
on the left arm.

"You have wrecked honest homes!" I argued with him in my mind. "You
put the torch to the widow's thatch, you have driven the cattle from
Elrigmore, and what of a girl with dark eyes like the sloe? Fancy man,
man of my fancy! Oh! here's the end of your journey!"

Our assailants, after their usual custom, dropped their pieces, such as
had them, when they had fired the first shot, and risked all on the push
of the target and the slash of the broad brand, confident even that our
six or seven feet of escarpment would never stay their onset any time to
speak of. An abattis or a fosse would have made this step futile; but as
things were, it was not altogether impossible that they might surmount
our low wall. Our advantage was that the terre-plein on which we stood
was three or four feet higher than they were at the outer side of the
wall, apart from the fact that they were poised precariously on a steep
brae. We leaned calmly over the wall and spat at them with pistols now
and then as they ran up the hill, with Clanranald and some captains
crying them on at the flank or middle. In the plain they left a piper
who had naturally not enough wind to keep his instrument going and face
the hill at the same time. He strode up and down in the deadliest part
of the valley where a well-sent musket ball would never lose him, and
played a tune they call "The Galley of the Waves," a Stewart rant with
a hint of the zest of the sea in it Nobody thought of firing at him,
though his work was an encouragement to our foes, and anon the hill-tops
rang with a duel of pibrochs between him and a lad of our garrison, who
got round on the top of the wall near the governor's house and strutted
high shoulder