Not all at once would this displacement take place, but fitfully, by waves that sometimes flowed in a spate of aggression, then again ebbed before some outbreak of determined resistance. The process may have been somewhat like what went on in Australia when “selectors” were empowered to “pick the eyes” of a squatter’s holding, here and there putting him to ransom in the name of law. Like Hengist and Horsa, the intruders might make good their settlement by taking sides in the local feuds, or by handling the arrows of Cupid as well as the sword of Mars. The Campbells were noted for being as ready with kisses for their foemen’s daughters as with cold steel for their sons. The Macgregors made alliances as well as _creaghs_ among the newcomers. Some of their hacked and stripped branches shot out to take root in distant quarters, perhaps repeating there the violence that had driven them from their own ancient seats. Under the James kings, such branches appear at Braemar and the Gordon country; and there are hints of a Macgregor leader playing Roderick Dhu as far south as the English border, in company with his supposed cousins, the Griersons of Lag. But the main stock remained scattered over their native heath, from which a remnant of them was never thoroughly extirpated. Their headquarters shifted to be about Balquhidder, a knot of wild glens to the north of Loch Katrine, where a stone called the _puderach_ was a palladium of the clan, the lifting of which made a test of strength for young men, and it gave a byname to the Macgregors of that branch. As far south as the Nun’s Island, Inchcailliach, on Loch Lomond, they had a burying-place; and their strongholds reached as far north as Loch Rannoch, where the chartered Menzies had more difficulty in ousting them than had the Campbells in Breadalbane, who there are well described as ploughing through the centre of the Macgregor country.