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But the Great Earl's mither was living they were a doughty and a dour race, the women o' the house o' Glenallan and she wad hae nae coronach cried for her son, but had him laid in the silence o' midnight in his place o' rest, without either drinking the dirge, or crying the lament.
And now over him in the dark night the great wings crashed, and beat abroad in the wind, and the ship made great way. And the mermen swam fast to be with her, and ceased from their own song, for the wind sang a coronach in the canvas and cordage.
To this the recollection of a venerable friend, recently taken from us in the fulness of years, then a schoolboy at Linlithgow, enables the author to add, that a much larger body of MacGregors than had cared to advance to Edinburgh received the corpse at that place with the coronach and other wild emblems of Highland mourning, and so escorted it to Balquhidder.
It was no wonder then that she should win the heart of the simple old man speedily and utterly; for what can bard desire beyond a true listener a mind into which his own may, in verse or tale or rhapsody, in pibroch or coronach, overflow?
The flanking parties of horse were forced in upon the centre, and though, as even Turner grants, they fought with desperation, a general flight was the result. But when they fell there was none to sing their coronach or wail the death-wail over them.
Unwilling to miss any advantage, in a situation where so much was at stake, Wallace gladly hailed a twinkling light, which gleamed from what he supposed the window of a distant cottage. Kirkpatrick, with Macdougal, offered to go forward, and explore what it might be. In a few minutes they arrived at a thatched building; from which, to their surprise, issued the wailing strains of the coronach.
Three of the Highlanders were killed, and they brought them in, wrapped in their plaids, and laid them on the stone floor of the hall; and next morning, their wives and daughters came, clapping their hands, and crying the coronach, and shrieking, and carried away the dead bodies, with the pipes playing before them.
Never was the fiery cross borne throughout the beautiful country of Invernessshire, never was the wail of the coronach heard on a more ignoble occasion, than on the summons of the Master of Lovat, in the September of the year 1698.
Three of the Highlanders were killed, and they brought them in wrapped in their plaids, and laid them on the stone floor of the hall; and next morning, their wives and daughters came, clapping their hands, and crying the coronach, and shrieking, and carried away the dead bodies, with the pipes playing before them.
The venerable figure clasped his hands, and in a voice of mournful solemnity exclaimed: "Art thou come, doomed of Heaven, to hear thy sad coronach?" Wallace started at this salutation. The bard, with the same emotion, continued; "No choral hymns hallow thy bleeding corpse wolves howl thy requiem eagles scream over thy desolate grave! Fly, chieftain, fly!"
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