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There were no trees, and but few houses. The chief signs of human labour were the rounded piles of peat, and the square cuttings in the moor marking the places where the subterranean wood-choppers had gathered their harvests. The long straths were once cultivated, and every patch of arable land had its group of cottages full of children.
In the beginning of August his hopes had again turned to Poole Ewe, but learning for a second time that no French ship could land on the closely guarded coast, he and his friends determined to remain in the northern straths of Inverness-shire till the Government troops should withdraw from the Great Glen the chain of lakes which now forms the Caledonian Canal and thus leave the way clear into Badenoch, where Lochiel and Macpherson of Cluny were hiding.
But no; there was no such friendly or avenging glare; the brooding skies lay over the sombre valleys, and the gloomy phantasmagoria slowly changed and changed in that unearthly twilight, as the mists and the wind and the rain transformed the solid hills and the straths into intermingling vapors and visions.
On his visits to the Highlands, it was not alone the Highland straths and mountains, nor the Highland Chieftain's absolute mastership of his clan, nor was it the picturesque dress the "Garb of old Gaul" which attracted him. The Earl of Selkirk has been charged by those who knew little of him with being a man of feudal instincts. His temper was the exact opposite of this.
There are tracts of country of extraordinary extent capable of producing the heaviest crops. There are garden lands around most of the western cities, on which these cities of yesterday subsist and have arisen. And even in Lower Canada there are straths of wonderful fertility.
At fast and loose. At belly to belly. At scutchbreech. At the dales or straths. At the broom-besom. At the twigs. At St. Cosme, I come to adore At the quoits. thee. At I'm for that. At the lusty brown boy. At I take you napping. At greedy glutton. At fair and softly passeth Lent. At the morris dance. At the forked oak. At feeby. At truss. At the whole frisk and gambol. At the wolf's tail.
When any affront was offered to a chieftain, the clan was instantly summoned. They came from their straths and their secluded valleys, wherein there was little intercourse with society in general to tame their native pride, or to weaken the predominant emotion of their hearts, their pride in their chieftain.
The straths are all of them fertile to an extraordinary degree, and as I have already stated, both they and the hill-sides abound with inhabitants. Yet is the country a mountain district, in every sense of the word, though the very mountains either are by nature, or have by industry been rendered, uncommonly fertile. The great defect in Bohemian scenery, is the absence of water.
The allusion to his funeral had something touching, coming from the old Highland chieftain. Almost the solitary good trait in Lovat's character was the fondness for his Highland home a pride in his clan a yearning to the last for the mountains, the straths, the burns, now ravaged by the despoiler, and red with the blood of the Frasers.
'Do you know, said I, 'I would not give a yard's breadth of the shire of Argyll anywhere north of Knapdale at its rockiest for all your lush straths, and if it comes to antique pedigrees here am I, Clan Diarmid, with my tree going down to Donacha Dhu of Lochow. That was insolence, ill-considered, unnecessary, for this major of dragoons, as I tell you, might be my father and I was but a raw ensign."
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