s at every turn of the road, with
children playing below the mountain-ash that stands before each door.
You cannot go a step but human life's in sight Our march was in a
desolate valley--the winds with the cold odour (one might almost think)
of ruin and death.

Beyond Lecknamban, where the time by the shadow on Tom-an-Uarader was
three hours of the afternoon, a crazy old _cailleach_, spared by some
miracle from starvation and doom, ran out before us wringing her hands,
and crying a sort of coronach for a family of sons of whom not one had
been spared to her. A gaunt, dark woman, with a frenzied eye, her cheeks
collapsed, her neck and temples like crinkled parchment, her clothes
dropping off her in strips, and her bare feet bleeding in the snow.

Argile scoffed at the superstition, as he called it, and the Lowland
levies looked on it as a jocular game, when we took a few drops of her
blood from her forehead for luck--a piece of chirurgy that was perhaps
favourable to her fever, and one that, knowing the ancient custom, and
respecting it, she made no fraca about.

She followed us in the snow to the ruins of Camus, pouring out her
curses upon Athole and the men who had made her home desolate and her
widowhood worse than the grave, and calling on us a thousand blessings.

Lochow--a white, vast meadow, still bound in frost--we found was able to
bear our army and save us the toilsome bend round Stronmealchan. We put
out on its surface fearlessly. The horses pranced between the isles; our
cannon trundled on over the deeps; our feet made a muffled thunder, and
that was the only sound in all the void. For Cruachan had looked down on
the devastation of the enemy. And at the falling of the night we camped
at the foot of Glen Noe.

It was a night of exceeding clearness, with a moon almost at the full,
sailing between us and the south. A certain jollity was shed by it upon
our tired brigade, though all but the leaders (who slept in a tent)
were resting in the snow on the banks of the river, with not even a
saugh-tree to give the illusion of a shelter. There was but one fire in
the bivouac, for there was no fuel at hand, and we had to depend upon a
small stock of peats that came with us in the stores-sledge.

Deer came to the hill and belled mournfully, while we ate a frugal meal
of oat-bannock and wort. The Low-landers--raw lads--became boisterous;
our Gaels, stern with remembrance and eagerness for the coming business,
thawed