we were
the subjects, we did no more than hurry our pace.

By the irony of nature it was a day bright and sunny; the _londubh_
parted his beak of gold and warbled flutey from the grove, indifferent
to all this sorrow of the human world. Only in far-up gashes of the
hills was there any remnant of the snow we had seen cover the country
like a cloak but a few days before. The crows moved briskly about in the
trees of Cladich, and in roupy voices said it might be February of the
full dykes but surely winter was over and gone. Lucky birds! they were
sure enough of their meals among the soft soil that now followed the
frost in the fields and gardens; but the cotters, when their new grief
was weary, would find it hard to secure a dinner in all the country once
so well provided with herds and hunters, now reft of both.

I was sick of this most doleful expedition; M'Iver was no less, but he
mingled his pity for the wretches about us with a shrewd care for the
first chance of helping some of them. It came to him unexpectedly in a
dark corner of the way through Cladich wood, where a yeld hind lay with
a broken leg at the foot of a creag or rock upon which it must have
stumbled. Up he hurried, and despatched and gralloched it with his
_sgian dubh_ in a twinkling, and then he ran back to a cot where women
and children half craved us as we passed, and took some of them up to
this lucky find and divided the spoil It was a thin beast, a prey no
doubt to the inclement weather, with ivy and acorn, its last meal, still
in its paunch.

It was not, however, till we had got down Glenaora as far as Carnus that
we found either kindness or conversation. In that pleasant huddle of
small cothouses, the Macarthurs, aye a dour and buoyant race, were
making up their homes again as fast as they could, inspired by the old
philosophy that if an inscrutable God should level a poor man's dwelling
with the dust of the valley, he should even take the stroke with
calmness and start to the building again. So the Macarthurs, some
of them back from their flight before Antrim and Athole, were throng
bearing stone from the river and turf from the brae, and setting up
those homes of the poor, that have this advantage over the homes of the
wealthy, that they are so easily replaced. In this same Carnus, in later
years, I have made a meal that showed curiously the resource of its
people. Hunting one day, I went to a little cothouse there and asked for
something t