a winter night as she kneels in the flickering light by the bedside, feeling the rough, loving hand relax its grasp, while she sees the shadow pass across the wistful face, and knows with breaking heart that she is alone? These are the peaceful scenes of peasant life; alas, that they should ever be darkened by the shadow of the sword! [Illustration] Granny can speak no English, or she might have something to say of the great disaster that befell the clans on the moor close by in her father’s time. For not far beyond the little clachan the road emerges on the open heath, and there, where the paths cross, lies the great, grey boulder on which the terrible duke stood to survey the field just before the battle. Not even then was he aware how nearly his birthday carousals of the night before, at Nairn, had been surprised and turned into another slaughter of Prestonpans. So perilously sometimes does the sword of Damocles tremble over an unconscious head. His troops, well rested and provisioned, were fresh as that April morning itself, while the poor clansmen in the boggy hollow to the right, divided in their councils, and famishing for treacherous lack of bread, were exhausted by the fruitless twenty-four mile surprise march of the night. Yet they came on, these clansmen, half an hour later, like lions; plunging through the bog, sword in hand, in the face of the regulars’ terrific blaze of musketry, cutting Cumberland’s first line to pieces, and rushing on the second line to be blown to atoms at sword’s length. The yellow corn is being shorn to-day where the clans were mowed down then. Here was spilt the best blood of the Highlands. Close by, the brave Keppoch, crying out as he charged alone before the eyes of his immovable Macdonalds that the children of his tribe had forsaken him, threw his sword in the air as a bullet went into his heart. Wounded, at the tall tree to the west fell Cameron of Lochiel; and in the little valley beyond, the defeated Prince Charles, as he fled, paused a moment to bid his army a bitter farewell. The road here at the corn-field’s edge dips a little yet, where the fatal bog once lay, and ten yards to the left still springs the Dead Men’s Well, to which so many poor fellows crawled during the awful succeeding night to allay the tortures of their thirst before they died. Here the gigantic MacGillivray, leader that day of the clan M’Intosh, fell dead as, with his last strength, he bore to the spring a little wounded boy whom he had heard at his side moaning for water.