Alpine pointed to the green knoll. It was a haunt of the fairies, who had decoyed therein his own grandfather, also a piper (for he played the clan into the action at Glenfruin), and he was seen no more till on a Halloween night, about fifty years after. His son, then an aged man, on passing, saw the hillock open like a chamber, and his father, still young and beardless, playing vigorously to hundreds of quaint little dancers in green doublets and conical hats. On finding himself conveyed into that Highland wilderness, whither few Lowlanders dared to venture in those days, all hope for the future died away in the heart of the unhappy Grahame of Killearn. Chance of escape he had none. He was secured by a rope round his waist, and this was tied to the girdle of Greumoch MacGregor, who, regardless of the failing strength and weak limbs of the dapper little chamberlain, marched sullenly on, with his poleaxe on his shoulder, a short tobacco-pipe in his mouth, and his vast plaid floating behind him, dragging his prisoner over rocks and stones, up steep ascents and down foaming watercourses, without pity or remorse, and without giving him time either to breathe or implore rest and pity. With growing terror Grahame remembered his treatment of the wife of MacGregor, when he pillaged Inversnaid, though under colour and authority of the civil law; he knew that it was by his counsels that the powerful Duke of Montrose had ruined poor Rob, and driven him to the hillside as an outlaw and reiver; and he gave himself up for utterly lost when the wild pass of Aberfoyle closed upon the rear of the marching band, and the vast spoil of cattle they had collected at the point of the sword. CHAPTER XXXIII. KILLEARN'S FATE. Rob Roy conveyed his prisoner to the head of Loch Katrine, and by the time he arrived there, exhausted by toil, by the rough nature of the steep paths he had been forced to traverse with such unwonted celerity, and moreover being in constant fear of a dreadful death by hanging on a tree, being drowned like a cur with a stone at his neck, or being shot by a platoon of MacGregors, the unhappy Killearn was in a deplorable plight, and had long since become quite passive in the hands of his captors. By order of Rob Roy, Greumoch placed him in a boat, and rowed him to an island in the loch, now well known to tourists as "Ellen's Isle;" it was covered with the richest copsewood, and there, in a hut with Greumoch and another equally grim Celt to watch him, Killearn remained in captivity, during which nothing was known of his fate in the Lowlands, until he was permitted to write to the duke.