A consultation followed. Mr. Lumsden was looking out eagerly for the chaise from Portoran. It could not arrive in less than an hour, Big Duncan said; and the minister with his own hands, endeavored to fix up more securely a shelter for the suffering lad. "What are we to do?" exclaimed one of the Macalpines.--"Neighbors, what is to become of us?--where are we to gang?" A loud scream from a young mother interrupted him; her infant was seized with the fearful cough and convulsive strugglings of croup. The poor young woman pressed it to her breast, and rushed to her own desolate cottage. Alas! what shelter was there? The roof lay in broken pieces on the ground; window and door were carried away; the fire had sunk into embers. She threw herself down before it, and tried to chafe the little limbs into warmth. Other mothers followed her. All the means known to their experience were adopted in vain. The terrible hoarse cough continued--the infant's face was already black. "What are we to do?" exclaimed the same voice again. "Are we to see our bairns die before our eyes? Duncan, we let them destroy our houses at your word! What are we to do?" "If ye had dune onything else," said Big Duncan Macalpine, "we would have had the roof of a jail ower our heads before this time--and it's my hope there is nae faint heart among us, that would have left the wives and the bairns to fend for themsels.--Neighbors, I know not what to do; if we could but get ower this night, some better hope might turn up for us." His sister brushed past them as he spoke, carrying hot water to bathe the suffering infant--not hot enough, alas! to do it any good. The other women were heaping peats upon a fire, to make ready more; the old people within Duncan's house crouched and shivered by the narrow hearth; the little children clinging to the skirts of their parents, were sobbing with the cold. "Get ower the night?" said Roderick Macalpine, "we might get along oursels on the hillside; but what's to come of them?" and he waved his hand towards the helpless circle by the fire--the aged, the dying, the children. "Sirs," said the old man coming forward, fancying as it seemed that they appealed to him, "let us go to the kirkyard. You can pit up shelters there--no man can cast ye out of the place where your forebears are sleeping. If they take all the land beside, ye have yet a right to that." The listeners shrank and trembled--the old man with his palsied head, and withered face, and wandering light blue eyes, proposing to them so ghastly a refuge. The Macalpines were not driven so utterly to extremity. It remained for these more enlightened days to send Highland cottars, in dire need, to seek a miserable shelter above the dust of their fathers.