laughing meaningly.

I got home when the day stirred among the mists over Strone.

CHAPTER V.--KIRK LAW.

Of course Clan MacNicoll was brought to book for this frolic on
Inneraora fair-day, banned by Kirk, and soundly beaten by the Doomster
in name of law. To read some books I've read, one would think our Gaels
in the time I speak of, and even now, were pagan and savage. We are not,
I admit it, fashioned on the prim style of London dandies and Italian
fops; we are--the poorest of us--coarse a little at the hide, too quick,
perhaps, to slash out with knife or hatchet, and over-ready to carry
the most innocent argument the dire length of a thrust with the sword.
That's the blood; it's the common understanding among ourselves. But we
were never such thieves and marauders, caterans bloody and unashamed, as
the Galloway kerns and the Northmen, and in all my time we had plenty to
do to fend our straths against reivers and cattle-drovers from the bad
clans round about us. We lift no cattle in all Campbell country. When
I was a lad some of the old-fashioned tenants in Glenaora once or twice
went over to Glen Nant and Rannoch and borrowed a few beasts; but the
Earl (as he was then) gave them warning for it that any vassal of his
found guilty of such practice again should hang at the town-head as
readily as he would hang a Cowal man for theftuously awaytaking a board
of kipper salmon. My father (peace with him!) never could see the logic
of it "It's no theft," he would urge, "but war on the parish scale: it
needs coolness of the head, some valour, and great genius to take fifty
or maybe a hundred head of bestial hot-hoof over hill and moor. I would
never blame a man for lifting a mart of black cattle any more than for
killing a deer: are not both the natural animals of these mountains,
prey lawful to the first lad who can tether or paunch them?"

"Not in the fold, father!" I mind of remonstrating once.

"In the fold too," he said. "Who respects Bredal-bane's fenced deer? Not
the most Christian elders in Glenurchy: they say grace over venison that
crossed a high dyke in the dead of night tail first, or game birds that
tumbled out of their dream on the bough into the reek of a brimstone
fire. A man might as well claim the fish of the sea and the switch of
the wood, and refuse the rest of the world a herring or a block of wood,
as put black cattle in a fank and complain because he had to keep watch
on them!"

It was odd