Such was the first of many strange conversations with the maniac, who, with all her sad brokenness of mind, was one of the most intellectual women I ever knew. Humble as were the circumstances in which I found her, her brother, who was at this time about two years dead, had been one of the best-known ministers of the Scottish Church in the Northern Highlands. To quote from an affectionate notice by the editor of a little volume of his sermons, published a few years ago--the Rev. Mr. Mackenzie of North Leith--"he was a profound divine, an eloquent preacher, a deeply-experienced Christian, and, withal, a classical scholar, a popular poet, a man of original genius, and eminently a man of prayer." And his poor sister Isabel, though grievously vexed at times by a dire insanity, seemed to have received from nature powers mayhap not inferior to his. We were not always engaged with the old divines; Isabel's tenacious memory was stored with the traditions of the district; and many an anecdote could she tell of old chieftains, forgotten on the lands which had once been their own, and of Highland poets, whose songs had been sung for the last time. The story of the "Raid of Gillie-christ" has been repeatedly in print since I first heard it from her: it forms the basis of the late Sir Thomas Dick Lander's powerful tale of "Allan with the Red Jacket;" and I have seen it in its more ordinary traditionary dress, in the columns of the _Inverness Courier_. But at this time it was new to me; and on no occasion could it have lost less by the narrator. She was herself a Mackenzie; and her eyes flashed a wild fire when she spoke of the barbarous and brutal Macdonalds, and of the measured march and unfaltering notes of their piper outside the burning chapel, when her perishing ancestors were shrieking in their agony within. She was acquainted also with the resembling story of that Cave of Eigg, in which a body of the Macdonalds themselves, consisting of men, women, and children--the entire population of the island--had been suffocated wholesale by the Macleods of Skye; and I have heard from her more good sense on the subject of the Highland character "ere the gospel changed it," as illustrated by these passages in their history, than from some Highlanders sane enough on other matters, but carried away by a too indiscriminating respect for the wild courage and half-instinctive fidelity of the old race. The ancient Highlanders were bold, faithful dogs, she has said, ready to die for their masters, and prepared to do, at their bidding, like other dogs, the most cruel and wicked actions; and as dogs often were they treated; nay, even still, after religion had made them men (as if condemned to suffer for the sins of their parents), they were frequently treated as dogs. The pious martyrs of the south had contended in God's behalf; whereas the poor Highlanders of the north had but contended in behalf of their chiefs; and so, while God had been kind