It is but natural that Miss Murray Macgregor would fain believe this crime “to have been perpetrated by men of another name.” She brings forward a tradition in the clan that it was really the work of MacIans of Glencoe, a name which has lived in the breath of historic sympathy. Two young lads of this race, we are told, had been caught poaching in Glenartney, as a punishment for which the forester clipped their ears. Insulted kinsmen vowed revenge for that injury; and the picturesque circumstance is added that their first step was the employment of a local witch, who threw such a spell over Drummond that the MacIans were invisible to him as they approached on their cruel errand. The Macgregor chief’s only part in the matter, we should believe, was harbouring those “Children of the Mist”; or, for some reason or other, it is admitted, he may be understood to have taken the responsibility of the crime upon himself. What came to be believed at the time was that the murderers carried Drummond’s head--his _hand_ in another story--to the Macgregor chief, who, assembling his clan at the church of Balquhidder, made them lay their hands upon the gory trophy, and swear to defend the authors of the deed, as done by their common determination. Sir Alexander Boswell, son of Johnson’s acolyte, has told the story in _Clan Alpine’s Vow_, a poem that reads like an attempt to catch the wind of the _Lady of the Lake’s_ popularity. The Privy Council made no doubt of the real culprits. Proclamation went forth against the “wicked Clan Gregor, continuing in blood, slaughters, hership, manifest reifts and storths committed upon His Highness’ peaceable and good subjects.” A Commission was issued to several noblemen and gentlemen, empowering them for three years to hunt down the Macgregor chief and a long list of his followers as specified by name. One account tells of thirty-seven Macgregors slain by a party which the murdered man’s brother had raised under this commission; another makes seventeen of the clan hanged upon one tree at Balquhidder, as a round dozen are said to have been at the end of Loch Earn. Against these statements their faithful historian can bring no more satisfactory disproof than depositions of old men in the early part of last century, who had the story in a form more favourable to the Macgregors, and thought it unlikely that such wholesale executions could have taken place without figuring in their traditions. Miss Murray Macgregor makes a stronger point by showing how, when little more than a year had passed, her ancestor the chief and his followers were formally pardoned for whatever share they may have had in Drummond’s murder. It was not always convenient, indeed, to hold on foot the volunteer police of the border line, where the King’s deputies often proved apter to look to the grinding of their own axes than to keeping keen the sword of justice.