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Immediately after her Majesty's arrival at Balmoral she went to Blair to see the Duke of Athole, who was hopelessly ill with cancer in the throat. The poor Duke bore up bravely. He had to receive the Queen in his own room, "full of his rifles and other implements and attributes of sport now for ever useless to him."
She followed us in the snow to the ruins of Camus, pouring out her curses upon Athole and the men who had made her home desolate and her widowhood worse than the grave, and calling on us a thousand blessings. Lochow a white, vast meadow, still bound in frost we found was able to bear our army and save us the toilsome bend round Stronmealchan. We put out on its surface fearlessly.
I noticed that a trickle of blood was running down my wrist, and I felt at the same time a beat at the shoulder that gave the explanation, and had mind that a fellow in the Athole corps had fired a pistolet point-blank at me, missing me, as I had thought, by the thickness of my doublet-sleeve. "You've got a cut," said Sir Donald. "You have a face like the clay."
Next morning, after the Captain had swallowed his morning draught of Athole brose, and departed in his coach and six, Mrs. Butler anew deliberated upon communicating to her husband her sister's letter. But she was deterred by the recollection, that, in doing so, she would unveil to him the whole of a dreadful secret, of which, perhaps, his public character might render him an unfit depositary.
Each important clan had some of those Helots attached to them: thus, the MacCouls, though tracing their descent from Comhal, the father of Finn or Fingal, were a sort of Gibeonites, or hereditary servants to the Stewarts of Appin; the Macbeths, descended from the unhappy monarch of that name, were subjects to the Morays and clan Donnochy, or Robertsons of Athole; and many other examples might be given, were it not for the risk of hurting any pride of clanship which may yet be left, and thereby drawing a Highland tempest into the shop of my publisher.
It was, perhaps, an endeavour to avert the impending ruin and devastation that followed, that the Master of Lovat gave their liberty to Lord Saltoun and Lord Mungo Murray, although not until he had threatened them both with hanging for interfering with his inheritance, and compelling Lord Saltoun to promise that he would, on arriving at Inverness, send a formal obligation for eight thousand pounds, never more to concern himself with the affairs of the Lovat estate, and that neither he nor the Marquis of Athole would ever prosecute either Lord Lovat or his son, or their clan in general, for the disgrace they had received in having been made prisoners, for any of the transactions of this affair.
But at length his enemy, the Earl of Athole, had a brief, but signal triumph over the dreaded chief. The circumstances under which it occurred are the following:
The gathering consisted principally of the Camerons of Locheil, some six hundred strong, and they brought with them two English companies captured on the 16th, disarmed and prisoners. The Duke of Athole performed the ceremony of unfurling the banner.
Next morning, after the Captain had swallowed his morning draught of Athole brose, and departed in his coach and six, Mrs. Butler anew deliberated upon communicating to her husband her sister's letter. But she was deterred by the recollection, that, in doing so, she would unveil to him the whole of a dreadful secret, of which, perhaps, his public character might render him an unfit depositary.
David Aitken, Edinburgh, a square-shaped bottle of thick and pretty clear glass, which was one of several of the same sort accidentally dug up some few years ago at Philiphaugh, in a place where there were also many buried gunflints. Montrose and his fellow-fugitives found their way back to their favourite Athole, and were not even yet absolutely in despair.
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