have given him credit for), M'Iver would speak of his narrow
escape at the end of the raiding.

"I had his life in the crook of my finger," he would say; "had I acted
on my first thought, Clan Campbell would never have lost Inverlochy; but
_bha e air an dan_,--what will be will be,--and Grahame's fate was not
in the crook of my finger, though so I might think it Aren't we the
fools to fancy sometimes our human wills decide the course of fate, and
the conclusions of circumstances? From the beginning of time, my Lord
Marquis of Montrose was meant for the scaffold."

Montrose, when he heard the child's cry, only looked to either hand to
see that none of his friends heard it, and finding there was no one
near him, took off his Highland bonnet, lightly, to the house where he
jaloused there was a woman with the wean, and passed slowly on his way.

"It's so honest an act," said John, pulling in his pistol, "that I would
be a knave to advantage myself of the occasion."

A generous act enough. I daresay there were few in the following of
James Grahame would have borne such a humane part at the end of a bloody
business, and I never heard our people cry down the name of Montrose
(bitter foe to me and mine) but I minded to his credit that he had a
compassionate ear for a child's cry in the ruined hut of Aora Glen.

Montrose gave no hint to his staff of what he had heard, for when he
joined them, he nor they turned round to look behind. Before us now,
free and open, lay the way to Inneraora. We got down before the dusk
fell, and were the first of its returning inhabitants to behold what
a scandal of charred houses and robbed chests the Athole and Antrim
caterans had left us.

In the grey light the place lay tenantless and melancholy, the snow of
the silent street and lane trodden to a slush, the evening star peeping
between the black roof-timbers, the windows lozenless, the doors burned
out or hanging off their hinges. Before the better houses were piles of
goods and gear turned out on the causeway. They had been turned about by
pike-handles and trodden upon with contemptuous heels, and the pick of
the plenishing was gone. Though upon the rear of the kirk there were two
great mounds, that showed us where friend and foe had been burled, that
solemn memorial was not so poignant to the heart at the poor relics of
the homes gutted and sacked. The Provost's tenement, of all the lesser
houses in the burgh, was the only one that stoo