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MacCailein fumed at first at the storm that kept his letters from him and spoiled the laburnums and elms he was coaxing to spring about his garden; but soon he settled down to his books and papers, ever his solace in such homely hours as the policy and travel of his life permitted. And if the burgh was dull and dark, night after night there was merriment over the drawbrig of the castle.
She put a head in at my tent last night, and 'Listen, MacCailein, said she, 'and keep on high roads, said she, 'and Inverlochy's a perilous place, said she, 'and I'd be wae to see the heather above the gall." John Splendid's back was to him as he sat at the prow of a boat coming close on our stern, but I saw the skin of his neck flame.
"Amen to yon!" cried MacCailein, beating his hand on a book-board, and Master Gordon took a snuff like a man whose doctrine is laid out plain for the world and who dare dispute it. In came the beadle with the MacNicolls, very much cowed, different men truly from the brave gentlemen who cried blood for blood on Provost Brown's stair.
"Perhaps not," said the cleric, drily; "but what if a general has only a sort of savage army at his call? The gentry of your clan " "What about MacCailein?" I asked, wondering that there was no word of the chief. "Go on with your story," said M'Iver, sharply, to the cleric.
Of course the fellows were found guilty one of stabbing, the other of art and part for MacLachlan was no friend of MacCailein Mor, and as little friend to the merchant burghers of Inneraora, for he had the poor taste to buy his shop provand from the Lamont towns of Low Cowal.
"Well never come to grips with MacCailein," said MacDonald, taking the badinage in good part, "so long as he has a back-gate to go out at or a barge to sail off in." "I could correct you on that point in a little affair of arms as between gentlemen if the time and place were more suitable," said M'Iver, warmly. "Let your chief defend himself, friend," said MacDonald.
"MacCailein!" said he, "I'll never call you coward, but I'll call you mad, book mad, closet mad! " And taught me a little of the trade of slaughter at the Western Isles thirty years ago come Candlemas," said the Marquis. "How a man ages! Then then I had a heart like the bird of spring." "He could have taught you worse! I'm your cousin, and I'll say it to your beard, sir!
He had his musketeers and pikemen separate, as the later laws demand; he had even a hint from myself of the due proportion of two pikes to three muskets." "But never a platoon fired a volley," I recalled. "It was steel and targe from the onset." And then I would add, "What's to be said for MacCailein?"
"You're no worse than myself," I said, rising to poke up the fire; "I'm thinking of Argile too, and I wish I could get his defalcation if that it may be called out of my mind. Was it a was it what you might call a desertion without dignity, or a step with half an excuse in policy? I know MacCailein had an injured arm." Gordon rose and joined me at the fireside.
"The same stilling, Barbreck, the same stilling I make no doubt MacCailein gets his brown brandy by my brother's cart from French Foreland; it's a rough road, and sometimes a bottle or two spills on the way. I've a flagon up in a cupboard in my little garret, and I'll go fetch it."
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