Thus, whichever way we take through the heart of Scotland--by Atholl, by Breadalbane, by Strathearn--we come upon memories of the Macgregors. It is at Balquhidder that this famous stock was most at home in historic times; so here seems the place for some account of it, a story that will carry us back over all those regions, and bring most of the Perthshire clans on to its stage. VI THE MACGREGORS What perils do environ The man that meddles with cold iron --in the shape of a pen! And surely the rash adventurer lays himself open to special risks when he undertakes to touch such a thistly subject as Scottish history, not to mention theology. It seems that I have given offence to certain partisans, who find their sympathies ruffled by what had to be said in my former volumes. I am accused of want of reverence for the Sabbath--an idol that, even in the cold North, is wearing away to a stump like snow wreaths in thaw. By an organ of that persuasion I am rebuked, more in sorrow than in anger, for enmity to the Free Church, my only expression of such enmity being a statement that the said worshipful body has set its face against dancing and piping in the Highlands, and a hint that it must be heartily ashamed of the way it treated one of its worthiest sons in our generation. But the hottest of my ecclesiastical assailants is a “Priest of the Church of England,” who writes to me from a Midland county, characterising my book on the Highlands as “nauseating,” “ungenerous,” “brutal,” and so forth. I will not give his name, for I guess this priest not so far out of deaconship as to be beyond a chance of learning better language in a less perfervid country. He appears to be a Highlander of Catholic loyalty, since he takes alike ill any aspersion on the fair fame of Glengarry or of Argyll; but amid much abusing at large, he waxes specially indignant that I have not been silent on the “later failings” of the poor young Pretender. Did I not say in advance that there are three subjects on which the hardest-headed Scot listens willingly to sentiment rather than reason? One of them, of course, is gallant Prince Charlie; then I may be thankful to have passed over all scandal about Queen Mary, as to have touched lightly on the later, and earlier, “failings” of Robert Burns.