Scott compares the mountain clans to Afghan tribes, of whom he seems to have been reading some account. A more familiar resemblance is with the Red Indians of the backwoods, so well known to us through Catholic and Puritan adventurers on their borders. There was the same fierce pride, tempered by traits of generosity and scruples of honour; the same hardihood, along with impatience of regular work; in some cases the same veneer of Christian ritual; always the same restless turbulence of young warriors eager to prove their manhood, held more or less in check by the cooler heads of chiefs and counsellors. The moving narratives of the frontier settlers of New York and Pennsylvania give us some idea of what perils Menteith farmers had long to be familiar with, though indeed the wild Highlandmen seldom showed such cruel temper as was religiously cultivated in the Red Indian. There appears this other difference in the Highlands and the backwoods border feuds, that in the former, the jarring elements were brought into much closer relations, so that love played its part as well as hatred. The inveterate enemies of the wide New World would be separated from each other by great stretches of forest and prairie, through which war parties travelled for days and weeks, by stealthy paths and silent waterways, to fall at advantage upon their unguarded foe. The pale-face settlers could not feel themselves safe from vengeful redskins whose camp-fires were a hundred miles away. It is said that the Indian summer, that serene truce of nature, got its name through the red warriors taking then a last chance of a raid in force upon the frontier, before the snows held them back; yet even in the depth of winter bands of human wolves might come prowling about the lonely blockhouses, to drag away unwary or unlucky victims to a carnival of torture among their distant wigwams. No band of cultivators would care to fix themselves within a dozen miles of a tribe that was being slowly pushed out of its hunting-grounds. But in Menteith and behind its mountain walls, hereditary enemies were so closely packed together that it is hard to understand how they got on without mutual extermination.