and pretended to fortify his house.215 “I will not,” said Lochiel, “break the ice.  That is a point of honour with me.  But my tacksmen and people may use their freedom."216 His tacksmen and people understood him, and repaired by hundreds to the Sheriff to take the oaths.  The Macdonalds of Sleat, Clanronald, Keppoch, and even Glengarry, imitated the Camerons; and the chiefs, after trying to outstay each other as long as they durst, imitated their vassals.

The thirty-first of December arrived; and still the Macdonalds of Glencoe had not come in.  The punctilious pride of Mac Ian was doubtless gratified by the thought that he had continued to defy the government after the boastful Glengarry, the ferocious Keppoch, the magnanimous Lochiel had yielded:  but he bought his gratification dear.

At length, on the thirty-first of December, he repaired to Fort William, accompanied by his principal vassals, and offered to take the oaths.  To his dismay he found that there was in the fort no person competent to administer them.  Colonel Hill, the Governor, was not a magistrate; nor was there any magistrate nearer than Inverary.  Mac Ian, now fully sensible of the folly of which he had been guilty in postponing to the very last moment an act on which his life and his estate depended, set off for Inverary in great distress.  He carried with him a letter from Hill to the Sheriff of Argyleshire, Sir Colin Campbell of Ardkinglass, a respectable gentleman, who, in the late reign, had suffered severely for his Whig principles.  In this letter the Colonel expressed a goodnatured hope that, even out of season, a lost sheep, and so fine a lost sheep, would be gladly received.  Mac Ian made all the haste in his power, and did not stop even at his own house, though it lay nigh to the road.  But at that time a journey through Argyleshire in the depth of winter was necessarily slow.  The old man’s progress up steep mountains and along boggy valleys was obstructed by snow storms; and it was not till the sixth of January that he presented himself before the Sheriff at Inverary.  The Sheriff hesitated.  His power, he said, was limited by the terms of the proclamation, and he did not see how he could swear a rebel who had not submitted within the prescribed time.  Mac Ian begged earnestly and with tears that he might be sworn.  His people, he said, would follow his example.  If any of them proved refractory, he would himself send the recusant to prison, or ship him off for Islanders.  His entreaties and Hill’s letter overcame Sir Colin’s scruples.  The oath was administered; and a certificate was transmitted to the Council at Edinburgh, setting forth the special circumstances which had induced the Sheriff to do what he knew not to be strictly regular.217