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The parks had a greener hue than any we had seen to the north; the town revealed but its higher chimneys and the gable of the kirk, still its smoke told of occupation; the castle frowned as of old, and over all rose Dunchuach. "O Dunchuach! Dunchuach!" cried M'Iver, in an ecstasy, spreading out his arms, and I thought of the old war-worn Greeks who came with weary marches to their native seas.
All the valley would be lying soundless and sedate, the hills of Salachary and the forest of Creag Dubh purpling in the setting sun, a rich gold tipping Dunchuach like a thimble. Then the eastern woods filled with dark caverns of shade, wherein the tall trunks of the statelier firs stood grey as ghosts.
On the very lowest edges of the wood, in the shade of a thick plump of beech, strewed generously about the foot by old bushes of whin and bramble, we lay at last studying the open country before us, and wondering how we should win across it to the friendly shelter of Dunchuach.
Dunchuach had never yet been attacked, but that was an experience expected at any hour, and its holders were ready for it They had disposed their guns round the wall in such a way as to command the whole gut between the hills, and consequently the path up from the glens.
He hung on his heel and looked back for a minute or two at the castle, looming blackly in the darkness against the background of Dunchuach; he could hear the broken stanza of Mrs. Petullo's ballad. "Amn't I the damned fool?" said he half-aloud to himself with bitter certainty in the utterance.
The castle, unlike its successor, sat adjacent to the river-side, its front to the hill of Dunchuach on the north, and its back a stone-cast from the mercat cross and the throng street of the town.
Para Mor stopped his song, projected his firelock over the wall as he ducked his body behind it all but an eye and shoulder and, with a hairy cheek against the stock, took aim at the foremost The crack of the musket sounded odd and moist in the mist, failing away in a dismal slam that carried but a short distance, yet it was enough to rouse Dunchuach.
Before the windows of the inn the bay lay warm and placid, and Dunchuach, wood-mantled, and the hills beyond it vague, remote, and haunted all by story, seemed to swim in a benign air, and the outer world drew the souls of these men in a tavern into a brief acquaintanceship. The window of the large room they sat in looked out upon this world new lit by the tender moon that hung on Strome.
"You look beautiful in that gown, Kate," said he, irrelevantly, not looking at it at all, but out at the window, where showed the gabbarts tossing in the bay, and the sides of the hill of Dunchuach all splashed with gold and crimson leafage. "Never mind my gown, Sim," said she, stamping her foot, and pulling at the buttons of his coat. "Once oh, Sim, do you love me? Tell me, tell me, tell me!
Here, if possible, it were better we should leave the wood and cut across the mouth of the Glen to Dunchuach on the other side. But there was no cover to speak of in that case.
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