All natural associations, however, whether weird or beautiful, and even the Cave of Ossian faded into insignificance compared with the thrilling story of the terrible massacre of February 13, 1690, when six score soldiers, most of them of Campbell’s clan, who had a personal spite against the Macdonalds, lived for twelve days in the glen, in order to become all the more successful murderers in the end. After receiving the hospitality of the villagers, they began early in the morning, before daylight, the massacre of men, women, and children. The work of butchery was finished by fire and the flocks and herds were driven off. From childhood we had heard this story. Who that has lived in Schenectady, New York, which suffered a like fate with Glencoe, during “King William’s War,” or who has studied, without family prejudice, the episode of Jacob Leisler, the people’s champion on Manhattan, but has heard of the many horrors for which William was blamed and unjustly condemned? What was the share of King William III in this Glencoe transaction? The subject has been discussed in pamphlets and books. Turning to Macaulay, the Whig historian,--since historiography, as with Grote, for example, is often political pamphletism,--who found his greatest hero in the Dutch Deliverer, we are told that His Majesty knew of the Macdonalds only as a rebellious clan who had rejected his conciliatory offers. The Government had, in good season, fixed the day for rebellion to cease, and in signing the order for their extirpation, His Majesty merely meant that the existence of the clan as a predatory gang should be broken up. Indeed, their stronghold had long been called “a den of thieves.” William did not know that the certificates of loyalty to the throne, made in correct form by MacIan, the chief of the Macdonalds at Glencoe, had been delayed for a week after the date of possible pardon, and that this certificate had been suppressed so that when he signed the order of attack, he was ignorant of the situation. It is not for us to give judgment in the case. On the second visit our travel mate, Frances, on seeing the dark glen, felt like a child entering into a haunted chamber, almost expecting the ghosts of the Macdonalds to rise up and call for justice.