We now proceed to the story of the chief who loved a Virgilian quotation. In the army of Charles Edward there was no man more detested and feared than Col Macdonell of Barisdale. According to a curious tract, ‘The Life of Archibald Macdonell of Barisdale, who is to Suffer for High Treason on the Twenty Second of May, at Edinburgh, By an Impartial Hand,’[52] Col of Barisdale was son (? grandson) of the second brother of Alastair Dubh Macdonnell of Glengarry, the hero of Sheriffmuir, being thus a cousin of Glengarry. He was a man of prodigious muscular force, six feet four inches in height. He is said to have caught and held a roedeer; and, on one occasion, to have heaved a recalcitrant cow, probably stolen property, into a boat. There lay, in the present century, on the gravel-drive before Invergarry House, a large boulder, and beside it a short pin of iron was fixed into the ground. Only a very powerful man could lift the boulder on to the pin, a few inches in height, but Barisdale could heave it up to his knees. So write, from tradition, the two ‘Stuarts d’Albanie,’ in ‘Tales of the Century’ (1847). They add that Barisdale’s courage did not match his strength, and that he yielded in single combat to Cluny. Returning to our ‘Impartial Hand’ (by his minute local knowledge a native of Ross or Moray), we find him nowise partial to Barisdale. ‘Colonel Ban,’ as he calls him, married a Miss Mackenzie of Fairburn, and, having a small estate in Ross-shire, could raise two hundred of the clan. He thus, says Murray of Broughton, declared himself independent of Glengarry, his chief, an indolent drunkard. Being acquainted with the Mackenzie estates, he used his knowledge in the surreptitious acquisition of cattle. He would then throw the blame on the Camerons; and that, says our author, is precisely the cause of the bad name for cattle-stealing which the Camerons have unhappily acquired. One day Barisdale, with his Tail, met Cameron of Taask, with _his_ Tail, and was charged by Cameron with his misdeeds. Words grew high, claymores were drawn, and a finger of Cameron’s left hand was nearly lopped off. The intrepid chieftain, acting on the Scotch proverb, ‘Better a finger off than aye wagging,’ tore the injured limb from his hand, bound the wound with a handkerchief, ‘and so fell to work on Barisdale,’ whom he sliced on the pate. ‘The skin and a lock of his hair hung down,’ and their devoted tenants, anxious observers of the fray, separated the infuriated chieftains. Barisdale was presently arrested on a charge of theft, but his Tail perjured themselves manfully, and he got off on an alibi.