e middle of the glen we were drenched to the hide, and
the rain was flowing from the edges of our kilts in runnels. Thus heaven
scourged us with waters till about the hour of noon, when she alternated
water with wind and gales burst from the west, the profound gorges
of Stob Dubh belching full to the throat with animus. There were
fir-plantings by the way, whose branches twanged and boomed in those
terrific blasts, that on the bare brae-side lifted up the snow with an
invisible scoop and flung it in our faces.

Stewart and the man with the want led the way, the latter ever with his
eyes red a-weeping, looking about him with starts and tremors, moaning
lamentably at every wail of wind, but pausing, now and then, to gnaw
a bone he had had enough of a thief s wit to pouch in the house of the
blind widow. Stewart, a lean wiry man, covered the way with a shepherd's
long stride-heel and toe and the last spring from the knee-most
poverty-struck and mean in a kilt that flapped too low on his leg and
was frayed to ribbons, a man with but one wish in the world, to save his
own unworthy skin, even if every one else of our distressed corps found
a sodden and abominable death in the swamps or rocks of that doleful
valley. Then on the rear behind those commoners came the minister and
John Splendid and myself, the minister with his breeks burst at the
knees, his stockings caught up with a poor show of trimncss by a braid
of rushes, contrived by M'Iver, and his coat-skirts streaming behind
him. You could not but respect the man's courage: many a soldier I've
seen on the dour hard leagues of Germanie--good soldiers too, heart and
body---collapse under hardships less severe. Gordon, with a drawn and
curd-white face, and eyes burning like lamps, surrendered his body to
his spirit, and it bore him as in a dream through wind and water, over
moor and rock, and amid the woods that now and again we had to hide in.

That we had to hide so little was one of the miracles of our traverse.
At any other time perhaps Glencoe and the regions round about it would
be as well tenanted as any low-country strath, for it abounded on either
hand with townships, with crofts that perched on brief plateaux, here
and there with black bothy-houses such as are (they say) the common
dwellings over all the Hebrid Isles. Yet, moving, not in the ultimate
hollow of the valley, but in fighting fashion upon the upper levels, we
were out of the way of molestation, and in