"'Tis well, Carden; now you speak like a reasonable man, and shall be alike welcome to your own rooftree, and to share with me a glass of wine from your own cellar. Admit the laird, Greumoch," he added to that personage, who had charge of the bridge and gate. He then hurried down, and after courteously assisting the lady to alight from her pillion, he conducted her into the castle, where he soon received the tax, granted a receipt for it in legal form, and drawing off his men, marched under cloud of night, and with all speed, towards the mountains. Since the battle of Glenfruin, and its subsequent severities, the MacGregors had been a scattered clan; but they now began to flock to Rob Roy in such numbers that he soon found himself at the head of five hundred swordsmen. As the representative of Glengyle, his influence over them was very great, and they all regarded him as the man ordained by Heaven to avenge their injuries on the Lowlanders; for a wrong done to one member of a clan was a wrong done to all, as they were all kinsmen, and related by blood. Habituated to war and the use of arms, to a love of each other and of their chief, a clan was endued with what an historian terms the two most active principles of human nature--attachment to one's friends and hatred of their enemies. "Thus," says Sir John Dalrymple, "the humblest of a clan, knowing himself to be as well born as the head of it, revered in his chief his own honour; loved in his clan his own blood; complained not of the difference of station into which fortune had thrown him, and respected himself. The chief in return bestowed a protection founded equally on gratitude and the consciousness of his own interest. Hence the Highlanders, whom more savage nations called savage, carried in the outward expression of their manners the politeness of courts without their vices, and in their bosoms the highest point of honour without its follies."* * "Memoirs of Great Britain." Notwithstanding the reward offered for his apprehension, Rob Roy was often rash enough to venture from his fastness alone, and into the very territories of his enemies, for he had become openly an adherent of the exiled House of Stuart, and deep schemes were on foot for maturing the plans of an insurrection; and the conduct of many of these intrigues was committed to his care. On one of these missions he found himself belated one night near the village of Arnpryor, in the district of Kippen, to which he had paid more than one hostile visit, and where, consequently, he was exposed to many dangers.