had their suspicions aroused, but these had been allayed by Glenlyon.  However, an old servant woke them and told them to flee for their lives as their father had been murdered, and as they escaped they heard the shouts of the murderers, the firing of muskets, the screams of the wounded, and the groans of the dying rising from the village, and it was only their intimate knowledge of the almost inaccessible cliffs that enabled them to escape.  At the house where Glenlyon lodged, he had nine men bound and shot like felons.  A fine youth of twenty years of age was spared for a time, but one, Captain Drummond, ordered him to be put to death; and a boy of five or six, who had clung to Glenlyon’s knees entreating for mercy and offering to become his servant for life if he would spare him, and who had moved Glenlyon to pity, was stabbed by Drummond with a dirk while he was in the agony of supplication.  Barber, a sergeant, with some soldiers, fired on a group of nine MacDonalds who were round their morning fire, and killed four of them, and one of them, who escaped into a house, expressed a wish to die in the open air rather than inside the house, “For your bread, which I have eaten,” said Barber, “I will grant the request.”  Macdonald was accordingly dragged to the door, but he was an active man and, when the soldiers presented their firelocks to shoot him, he cast his plaid over their eyes and, taking advantage of their confusion and the darkness, he escaped up the glen.  Some old persons were also killed, one of them eighty years of age; and others, with women and children who had escaped from the carnage half clad, were starved and frozen to death on the snow-clad hills whither they had fled.

  The winter wind that whistled shrill,
  The snows that night that cloaked the hill,
  Though wild and pitiless, had still
  Far more than Southern clemency.

It was thrilling to read the account of the fight between the two Clans, Mackenzie and MacDonnell, which the Mackenzies won.  When the MacDonnells were retreating they had to cross a river, and those who missed the ford were either drowned or killed.  A young and powerful chief of the MacDonnells in his flight made towards a spot where the burn rushed through a yawning chasm, very wide and deep, and was closely followed by one of the victorious Mackenzies; but MacDonnell, forgetting the danger of the attempt in the hurry of his flight and the agitation of the moment, and being of an athletic frame and half naked, made a desperate leap, and succeeded in clearing the rushing waters below.

Mackenzie inconsiderately followed him, but, not having the impulse of the powerful feelings that had animated MacDonnell, he did not reach the top of the opposite bank, succeeding only in grasping the branch of a birch tree, where he hung suspended over the abyss.  Macdonnell, finding he was not being followed, returned to the edge of the chasm, and, seeing Mackenzie’s situation, took out his dirk, and as he cut off the branch from the tree he said, “I have left much behind me with you to-day; take that also,” and so Mackenzie perished.