In 1596 Macgregor appeared at court, like Roderick Dhu at Holyrood, to give pledges and promises for the good behaviour of his hornet hive. But a few years later came an outbreak that seemed to fill the cup of their offences. There was an old smouldering feud between them and their neighbours, the Colquhouns of Loch Lomond, which flared up into open war just before James succeeded to the English crown. In _The Highlands and Islands_, I gave the traditional version of the Glenfruin fight. Miss Murray Macgregor points out that there were two fights at a few weeks’ interval, one in Glenfinlas, the other in Glenfruin. It was after the first affair, described as a “raid,” that the procession of widows carrying the bloody shirts of the slain stirred James into commissioning Colquhoun of Luss to repress the Macgregors. Then followed the famous battle in that “Glen of Sorrow,” which the Macgregor historian shows to have been fairly fought and won by the courage and strategy of the Macgregors and their allies, who had taken the initiative against a hostile force advancing to attack them. As for the legend of the slaughtered scholars, she justly insists that this story does not enter into the legal charges formulated against her clan, from which such an atrocity would hardly fail to be omitted if it could be brought home to them. She quotes another tradition as to this crime being the work of a monster or madman of uncertain name; and she is able to show that a few years later a highlander of Glencoe was accused before the Privy Council of having “with his own hand murdered without pity the number of forty poor persons who were naked and without armour,” probably those scholars or other sightseers who had come out from Dumbarton to see the battle, and whom the Macgregor annals represent the chief as placing in a church out of harm’s way; he is also said to have expressed the utmost horror at their unhappy fate. Furthermore, the Macgregors’ plea includes a charge, founded on the dying declaration of their resentful chief, that sly Argyll had a hand in the whole quarrel, who, while professing to keep the peace of the Highlands, was not above secretly setting two hostile clans by the ears that they might destroy one another like Kilkenny cats, at the same time, perhaps, throwing into relief the need for the services of a powerful lord-lieutenant on the Highland border. For myself, I will only say that in the whole affair there appears no evidence to call a blush to the cheek of modern Macgregors; and that I regret having hurt any clan feeling by my slight account of this battle long ago. The Colquhouns’ story has been set forth by Sir William Fraser; and that clan counts among its daughters a distinguished author who might draw the pen against the Macgregor historian, if so disposed. As for the Argyll family of to-day, they are all authors, so I leave it to them to controvert the many hard things that have been said against their forbears.