lenient Secretary of State, would not venture to reprieve one of them. It was different then. Not a word of it appeared in the meagre newspapers of that day. Floating rumours there were, but they were all, in many particular points, wide of the mark, and it was long ere the particulars condensed into the tragic and terrible tale which is certainly stranger than fiction. Very little interest was then felt in Highlands feuds, and as Macaulay truly says, "To the Londoner of those days Appin was what Caffrarra or Borneo is to us. He was not more moved by hearing that some Highland thieves had been surprised and killed, than we are by hearing that a band of Amakosah cattle-stealers had been cut off, or that a barkful of Malay pirates had been sunk." Gradually, however, the dark truth came out, and orbed itself into that blood-red unity of horror, which has since made the firmest nerves to tremble, and the stoutest knees to shake, which has haunted dreams, inspired poetry, created new and ghastly shapes of superstition, and which, even yet, as the solitary traveller is plodding his way amidst the shadows of an autumn evening, or under the shivering stars of a winter night, can drench the skin and curdle the blood. No wonder though the actors in the tragedy felt, in their dire experience afterwards, that the infatuation of crime dissolves the moment it is perpetrated; that Breadalbane sought the sons of the murdered MacIan to gain impunity for himself by signing a document declaring him guiltless; that Glencoe haunted the couch and clouded the countenance, and shortened the days of Glenlyon. Hamilton apparently felt no remorse, and his only regret was that any had escaped, and that a colossal crime had been truncated by some colossal blunders. He might have said like the Templar in the Talisman, when some one tells him to tremble, "I cannot if I would." And yet as God comes often to men without bell, so there might be some secret passage through which, on noiseless footsteps, remorse might reach even the sullen chamber of his hardened heart. Many lessons might be derived from the whole story, none, after all, more obvious and none more useful than the old old story of the desperate wickedness of human nature when unpenetrated by brotherly and Christian feeling; and that he who has sounded the ocean, the grave, the deepest and the darkest mountain cavern has yet a deeper deep to fathom in the abyss of his own heart; and that the moral of the subject may be yet more briefly condensed in the one grand line which Shelley has borrowed from Burke:-- "To fear ourselves and love all human kind." GEO. GILFILLAN.