The statesman, to whom chiefly this great crime is to be ascribed, had planned it with consummate ability:  but the execution was complete in nothing but in guilt and infamy.  A succession of blunders saved three fourths of the Glencoe men from the fate of their chief.  All the moral qualities which fit men to bear a part in a massacre Hamilton and Glenlyon possessed in perfection.  But neither seems to have had much professional skill; Hamilton had arranged his plan without making allowance for bad weather, and this in a country and at a season when the weather was very likely to be bad.  The consequence was that the fox earths, as he called them, were not stopped in time.  Glenlyon and his men committed the error of despatching their hosts with firearms instead of using the cold steel.  The peal and flash of gun after gun gave notice, from three different parts of the valley at once; that murder was doing.  From fifty cottages the half naked peasantry fled under cover of the night to the recesses of their pathless glen.  Even the sons of Mac Ian, who had been especially marked out for destruction, contrived to escape.  They were roused from sleep by faithful servants.  John, who, by the death of his father, had become the patriarch of the tribe, quitted his dwelling just as twenty soldiers with fixed bayonets marched up to it.  It was broad day long before Hamilton arrived.  He found the work not even half performed.  About thirty corpses lay wallowing in blood on the dunghills before the doors.  One or two women were seen among the number, and, a yet more fearful and piteous sight, a little hand, which had been lopped in the tumult of the butchery from some infant.  One aged Macdonald was found alive.  He was probably too infirm to fly, and, as he was above seventy, was not included in the orders under which Glenlyon had acted.  Hamilton murdered the old man in cold blood.  The deserted hamlets were then set on fire; and the troops departed, driving away with them many sheep and goats, nine hundred kine, and two hundred of the small shaggy ponies of the Highlands.

It is said, and may but too easily be believed, that the sufferings of the fugitives were terrible.  How many old men, how many women with babes in their arms, sank down and slept their last sleep in the snow; how many, having crawled, spent with toil and hunger, into nooks among the precipices, died in those dark holes, and were picked to the bone by the mountain ravens, can never be known.  But it is probable that those who perished by cold, weariness and want were not less numerous than those who were slain by the assassins.  When the troops had retired, the Macdonalds crept out of the caverns of Glencoe, ventured back to the spot where the huts had formerly stood, collected the scorched corpses from among the smoking ruins, and performed some rude rites of sepulture.  The tradition runs that the hereditary bard of the tribe took his seat on a rock which overhung the place of slaughter, and poured forth a long lament over his murdered brethren, and his desolate home.  Eighty years later that sad dirge was still repeated by the population of the valley.233