foster-children, to be brought up in bonds that were sometimes drawn as close as those of blood. As the Hurons in Ontario and the Iroquois in New York, the main stock of this clan seem to have been originally most at home in what came to be known as the Macgregor country--Glenorchy, Glendochart and Glenlyon--on the western side of Perthshire. Early in the twelfth century, its chief was Malcolm of Glenorchy, renowned for such strength of body as then made the surest title to rank and fame. Of him it is told that when the king’s life was in danger from a boar, or other savage beast, the doughty chief plucked up an oak by the roots and with this gigantic club made mincemeat of the monster. As reward, the grateful king ennobled his preserver, giving him as cognisance an oak-tree eradicate, now displayed by the clan, whose older emblem appears to have been a pine-tree, “Clan Alpine’s pine in banner brave.” This chief married a lady of royal blood, and was known as “Lord of the Castles,” by reason of several strongholds said to have been built by him from Kilchurn to Taymouth; but here tradition may be confusing him with a supplanting Campbell who had the same renown. In the next century another Macgregor figures among the partisans of Bruce, delivering him from his enemy, Lorn, harbouring him in a cave, fighting by his side at Bannockburn, and elsewhere. But it seems that all the clan did not stand together, some siding with Baliol and thus exposing themselves to forfeiture, when his rival became settled on the throne. And even before this the sons of the mountain glens must have begun to feel the pressure of the feudal system, imposing duties and obligations, as well as conferring coats of arms and titles, along with charters of lordship that did not always take into account the rights of inheritance. Swarms of Saxon and Norman adventurers hived themselves in Scotland, winning favour at court and grants of land from which the occupants had to be ousted by force, where they were not found willing to remain as vassals of the new lords. A proud and uncomplying race like the Macgregors was bound to come off ill in such a scramble; whose history, indeed, all through the Stuart period, is one of gradual intrusion into their country by strangers, notably the pushful Campbells, who at last drove them out of their fair glens to outlawed seclusion in fastnesses from which they looked with an angry eye on their old birthright. Where dwell we now? See rudely swell Crag over crag, and fell o’er fell. Ask we this savage hill we tread For fattened steer or household bread; Ask we for flocks those shingles dry, And well the mountain might reply-- “To you, as to your sires of yore, Belong the target and claymore: I give you shelter in my breast, Your own good blades must win the rest!