o eat A field of unreaped barley stood ripe and dry before
the door. Out the housewife went and cut some straws of it, while her
daughter shook cream in a bottle, chanting a churn-charm the while. The
straw was burned to dry the grain, the breeze win'd it, the quern ground
it, the fire cooked the bannocks of it Then a cow was milked, a couple
of eggs were found in the loft, and I sat down in a marvellously short
space of time to bread and butter, milk, eggs, and a little drop of
spirits that was the only ready-made provand in the house. And though
now they were divided between the making of coronachs and the building
of their homes, they had still the art to pick a dinner, as it were, off
the lichened stone.

There was one they called Niall Mor a Chamais (Big Neil of Karnes), who
in his day won the applause of courts by slaying the Italian bully who
bragged Scotland for power of thew, and I liked Niall Mor's word to us
as we proceeded on our way to Inneraora.

"Don't think," said he, "that MacCailein's beat yet, or that the boar's
tusks are reaped from his jaw. I am of an older clan than Campbell, and
closer on Diarmaid than Argile himself; but we are all under the one
banner now, and I'll tell you two gentlemen something. They may tear
Castle Inneraora out at the roots, stable their horses in the yard of
Kilmalieu, and tread real Argile in the clay, but well be even with them
yet. I have an arm here" (and he held up a bloody-looking limb, hashed
at Inverlochy); "I'll build my home when this is mended, and i'll
challenge MacDonald till my mouth is gagged with the clod."

"And they tell me your son is dead yonder," I said, pitying the old man
who had now no wife nor child.

"So they tell me," said he; "that's the will of God, and better a fast
death on the field than a decline on the feather-bed. I'll be weeping
for my boy when I have bigged my house again and paid a call to some of
his enemies."

Niall Mot's philosophy was very much that of all the people of the glen,
such of them as were left. They busily built their homes and pondered,
as they wrought, on the score to pay.

"That's just like me," M'Iver would say after speeches like that of
Niall Mor. He was ever one who found of a sudden all another person's
traits in his own bosom when their existence was first manifested to
him. "That's just like me myself; we are a beaten clan (in a fashion),
but we have our chief and many a thousand swords to the fore yet I