It is generally thought that the chiefs got information of the designs of their enemies, probably by communication from King James. At all events, in the end of the year to the profound mortification of Stair, the principal of them, Lochiel, Glengarry, Clanranald, Keppoch, and others came forward and took the oath of allegiance, all save one, MacIan, or Macdonald of Glencoe. Stair, as chief after chief took the oath, had been more and more chagrined and desirous that some one or other of the clans should refuse and become the victim of his vengeance. And one such tribe did at last fall into his vindictive and quivering jaws. It was the tribe of the Macdonalds, inhabiting, as a munition of rocks, the Valley of Glencoe. Glencoe is well known to the lovers of the picturesque as one of the very grandest scenes in Scotland. We have seen some of the sublimest scenes in Switzerland and in Norway, but none of them, not Chamouni nor the Romsdale Valley have obliterated the memory or lessened the admiration of that awful glen which we have often thought of as a softened Sinai--a smaller but scarcely gentler similitude of the Mount that might be touched. There are, of course, many diversities. Through the valley of Glencoe winds a stream called the Cona--a name of perfect music, soft as Italian, and which seems the very echo of the pathetic and perpetual wail of a lonely river. No such stream laves the foot of Sinai's savage hill. Then there lies below one of the boldest hills of the pass, a lovely little sheet of water, being the Cona dispread into a small lake looking up with childlike, trustful, untrembling, eye to the lowering summits above, and here and there a fine verdure creeps up the precipices and green pastures, and still waters encompass hills on which Aaron might have waited for death, or Moses ascended to meet God. But the mural aspect of many of the precipices, the rounded shape of some of the mountains contrasted with the sharp razor-like ridges of others, the deep and horrid clefts and ravines which yawn here and there, the extent, dreariness, solitude, and grandeur of the mountain range above--the summits you see, but scarcely see behind their nearer brethren, as though retiring like proud and lonely spirits into their own inaccessible hermitages, the appearance of convulsion and tearing in pieces and rending in twain, and unappeasable unreconciliation which insulates as it were, and lifts on end the whole region are those of Horeb, as we have seen it in picture or in dream, and the beholder might, on a cloudy and dark day, or on an evening which has set all the hills on fire, become awestruck and silent, as if waiting for another Avatar of the Ancient One on the thundersplit and shaggy peaks. In other moods, and when seen from a distance while sailing from Fort-William, its mountains have suggested the image of the last survivors of the giants on the eve of their defeat by Jove, collected together into one