My grandfather was popular among the Breadalbane men, to please whom he had, at various times, hanged sundry MacNabs and Mac Alpines, whose ideas of the eighth commandment were somewhat vague; thus on being sent into "the marquis's country" to recruit, he raised the required company in three days, and marched down from the hills of Glen Urcbai with pipes playing, across the dreary Braes of Rannoch, and down by the Brig of Tay with a hundred of the handsomest men that ever became food for gunpowder, all clad in their native tartans, and well armed, each with his own sword, dirk and pistols, to which the Government added the usual arms and accoutrements of the line. From Perth, the captain was ordered to march his company to Glasgow, there to embark for Ireland; and proceeding en route, after leaving Falkirk and traversing the remains of the Torwood, he found himself, with his little command, approaching the burgh of Kirkintulloch one dreary November evening, just as the dusk was closing in, while the rain fell in torrents, and the wind swept in gusts through the pastoral hollows and hurled the wet and withered leaves furiously before it. There he was compelled to halt, and oblige the authorities to procure immediate quarters for a hundred Highlanders--a race of whom the westland Whigs had harboured a holy aversion and wholesome terror, since the epoch of the Great Montrose and his daredevil Cavaliers, one hundred and twenty years before. "But what has all this to do with the Wife of the Red Comyn?" the reader may ask. I answer, everything--for had not my grandfather halted on that wet November night in the ancient burgh of Kirkintulloch, that good lady--though she made some noise in her time--had never been introduced to the reader's notice. So patience yet awhile. The soldiers were soon distributed among the people by the town constable, and in a few minutes after seeing the last man off to his billet, my grandfather found himself standing before the gate of the Castle of Kirkintulloch drenched through plaid and philabeg, while the rain dripped gracefully from his long feathers into the nape of his neck, and the water spouted from his scabbard as from a syringe when he sheathed his claymore. Draggled and weary, he knocked furiously against the gate of the huge mansion, on which, as being the most important in the town, he was billeted as commander of the forces. Being a Celt, and not blessed with overmuch patience, he thrust his billet-order almost into the mouth of the servant who opened the door, and then swaggered in with all the air of a man who had heard the forty days' cannonade at the Moro; but a couple of good drams from a jolly magnum bonum of Ferintosh, which were given to him without delay, at once restored his equanimity, and, chucking the plump housekeeper under the chin, my grandfather--or, as I shall call him in future, the captain--proceeded upstairs.