With an open and manly countenance, his features, in youth, are said to have been pleasing and cheerful in expression; but, by the course of life upon which unjust laws and adverse fortune hurried him, they gradually acquired that grave, and even morose, aspect, which we find depicted in the portrait of him possessed by Buchanan of Arden; the brows are knit, the eyes stern, and the firm lips compressed. He has a moustache, well twisted up, and a short curly beard, neither of which were then worn in England, or the Scottish Lowlands. He wears a round, blue bonnet, with a black cockade, and has his weather-beaten neck without collar or cravat.* * Two other portraits of Rob Roy are in existence. One belongs to the Antiquarian Museum at Edinburgh; the other to the Duke of Argyle, and it had a narrow escape from the fire which consumed the castle of Roseneath in 1802. His hair, from the colour of which he obtained his sobriquet of Roy (a corruption of _ruadh_, or red), was of a dark, ruddy hue, with short frizzly locks, which he wore without powder--a foolish fashion that was seldom found among the Highlanders, who usually tied their hair in a club behind. The circumstance that MacGregor was named _Red_ Robert, to distinguish him from others, is sufficient to show how false is the popular error which bestows hair of that colour upon every Highlander. "In his conflicts," says Sir Walter Scott, in the introduction to the novel which bears our hero's name, "Rob Roy avoided every appearance of cruelty; and it is not averred that he was ever the means of unnecessary bloodshed, or the actor of any deed that could lead the way to it. Like Robin Hood of England, he was a _kind and gentle_ robber, and, while he took from the rich, was liberal in relieving the poor. This might be policy; but the universal tradition of the country speaks of it to have arisen from a better motive. All whom I have conversed with--and in my youth I have seen some who knew Rob Roy personally--gave him the character of _a humane and benevolent man_." As yet, however, he was neither a robber nor an outlaw; but simply a Highland country gentleman, a chieftain of a broken clan, living under the protection of his mother's name and kindred; farming his little estate of Inversnaid; dealing in cattle, then the chief wealth of our northern mountains; and, being of a warlike disposition, occupying himself as the collector of black-mail--the local tax then paid by proprietors, whose estates lay south of the Highland frontier, to certain warlike chiefs and chieftains, northward of that line, for the armed protection of their lands and goods from the irruption of such caterans as those MacRaes, who had stolen the cattle from Inversnaid, and of whom we left Rob and his men in hot pursuit.