How should the bard of his clan ever talk to his own soul if he knew himself false to the name of his fathers! Hard fate for him! As if it were not enough that he had been doomed to save and rear a child of the brood abominable, he was yet further doomed, worst fate of all, to love the evil thing! he could not tear the lovely youth from his heart. But he could go further and further from him. As soon as he was able, he resumed his journey westward, and at length reached his native glen, the wildest spot in all the island. There he found indeed the rush of the torrents and the call of the winds unchanged, but when his soul cried out in its agonies, they went on with the same song that had soothed his childhood; for the heart of the suffering man they had no response. Days passed before he came upon a creature who remembered him; for more than twenty years were gone, and a new generation had come up since he forsook the glen. Worst of all, the clan-spirit was dying out, the family type of government all but extinct, the patriarchal vanishing in a low form of the feudal, itself already in abject decay. The hour of the Celt was gone by, and the long-wandering raven, returning at last, found the ark it had left afloat on the waters dry and deserted and rotting to dust. There was not even a cottage in which he could hide his head. The one he had forsaken when cruelty and crime drove him out, had fallen to ruins, and now there was nothing of it left but its foundations. The people of the inn at the mouth of the valley did their best for him, but he learned by accident that they had Campbell connections, and, rising that instant, walked from it for ever. He wandered about for a time, playing his pipes, and everywhere hospitably treated; but at length his heart could endure its hunger no more: he _must_ see his boy, or die. He walked therefore straight to the cottage of his quarrelsome but true friend, Mrs Partan--to learn that his benefactor, the marquis, was dead, and Malcolm gone. But here alone could he hope ever to see him again, and the same night he sought his cottage in the grounds of Lossie House, never doubting his right to re-occupy it. But the door was locked, and he could find no entrance. He went to the House, and there was referred to the factor. But when he knocked at his door, and requested the key of the cottage, Mr Crathie, who was in the middle of his third tumbler, came raging out of his dining-room, cursed him for an old Highland goat, and heaped insults on him and his grandson indiscriminately. It was well he kept the door between him and the old man, for otherwise he would never have finished the said third tumbler. That door carried in it thenceforth the marks of every weapon that Duncan bore, and indeed the half of his sgian dhu[3] was the next morning found sticking in it, like the sting which the bee is doomed to leave behind her. He returned to Mistress Partan white and trembling,