“There’s a house yonder,” said he, talking English for the benefit of the cleric; “it has a roaring fire and every sign of comfort, and it’s my belief there’s no one at home within but a woman and a few bairns. The odd thing is that as I get a look of the woman between the door-post and the wall, she sits with her back to the cruisie-light, patching clothes and crooning away at a dirge that’s broken by her tears. If it had been last week, and our little adventures in Glencoe had brought us so far up this side of the glen, I might have thought she had suffered something at our hands. But we were never near this tack-house before, so the housewife’s sorrow, whatever it is, can scarcely be at our door. Anyway,” he went on, “here are seven cold men, and weary men and hungry men too (and that’s the worst of it), and I’m going to have supper and a seat, if it’s the last in the world.” “I hope there’s going to be no robbery about the affair,” said the minister, in an apparent dread of rough theft and maybe worse. M’Iver’s voice had a sneer in every word of it when he answered in a very affected tongue of English he was used to assume when he wished to be at his best before a Saxon. “Is it the logic of your school,” he asked, “that what’s the right conduct of war when we are in regiments is robbery when we are but seven broken men? I’m trying to mind that you found fault with us for helping ourselves in this same Glencoe last week, and refused to eat Corrycrick’s beef in Appin, and I cannot just recall the circumstance. Are we not, think ye, just as much at war with Glencoe now as then? And have seven starving men not an even better right, before God, to forage for themselves than has an army?” “There’s a difference,” said the minister, stiffly. “We were then legitimate troops of war, fighting for the Solemn League and Covenant under a noble lord with Letters. It was the Almighty’s cause, and----” “Was it indeed?” said John Splendid. “And was Himself on the other side of Loch Leven when His tulzie was on?” “Scoffer!” cried Gordon, and M’Iver said no more, but led us through the dark to the house whose light so cheerfully smiled before us. The house, when we came to it, proved a trig little edifice of far greater comfort than most of the common houses of the Highlands--not a dry-stone bigging but a rubble tenement, very snugly thacked and windowed, and having a piece of kail-plot at its rear. It was perched well up on the brae, and its light at evening must have gleamed like a friendly star far up the glen, that needs every touch of brightness to mitigate its gloom. As we crept close up to it in the snow, we could hear the crooning John Splendid had told us of, a most doleful sound in a land of darkness and strangers. “Give a rap, and when she answers the door we can tell our needs peaceably,” said the minister.