He was sitting at a fire that was down to its grey ash, a mournful figure my heart was vexed to see. Now and then he would look about him, at the memorials of my mother, her chair and her Irish Bible (the first in the parish), and a posy of withered flowers that lay on a bowl on a shelf where she had placed them, new cut and fresh, the day she took to her deathbed. Her wheel, too, stood in the corner, with the thread snapped short in the heck--a hint, I many times thought, at the sundered interests of life. “I suppose we must be going with the rest,” I ventured; “there’s small sense in biding here to be butchered.” He fell in a rain of tears, fearing nor death nor hardship, I knew, but wae at the abandonment of his home. I had difficulty in getting him to consent to come with me, but at last I gave the prospect of safety in the town and the company of friends there so attractive a hue that he consented So we hid a few things under a _bruach_ or overhanging brae beside the burn behind the house, and having shut all the doors--a comical precaution against an army, it struck me at the time--we rode down to Inneraora, to the town house of our relative Craignure. It was a most piteous community, crowded in every lane and pend with men, women, and children dreadful of the worst All day the people had been trooping in from the landward parts, flying before the rumour of the Athole advance down Cladich. For a time there was the hope that the invaders would but follow the old Athole custom and plunder as they went, sparing unarmed men and women, but this hope we surrendered when a lad came from Camus with a tale of two old men, who were weavers there, and a woman, nailed into their huts and burned to death. Had Inneraora been a walled town, impregnable, say, as a simple Swabian village with a few sconces and redoubts, and a few pieces of cannon, we old soldiers would have counselled the holding of it against all comers; but it was innocently open to the world, its back windows looking into the fields, its through-going wynds and closes leading frankly to the highway.