"While the words were falling from his lips the awful figure stood before him, arrayed as an ancient warrior of the hills, and a halo of lambent fire playing around his form rendered him terribly distinct amidst the surrounding darkness. My father’s brain boiled and whirled while he looked upon him, and his heart grew sick and palsied with fear: he knew that he was in the presence of an infernal spirit. Notwithstanding his terror, he recognised the white-haired warrior from whose hand he had received the dirk, and whom he had followed with taunt and defiance through the wood; but a superhuman courage armed his heart and nerved his hand, and calling aloud on heaven and Saint Colm of lona to aid him, he rushed forward to the encounter. The face of the spectre was changed from what he had first seen it: it was distorted and terrible with rage, and his eyes glared like stars of fire. My father saw the blade of the _lham-dearg_ descending like a flash of lightning, yet he shrunk not; he felt it ringing upon his target, but he sunk with the mighty force of the blow, and a whirlwind seemed again to rush through the cavern, and bear him along with it, dashing him senseless to the earth. "When consciousness returned, the morning sun was shining gaily in the wide blue vault, the dewy pines of Rothiemurchus were glistening in the light, and afar off rose the huge sides of the blue Cairngorm. The eagle was boldly winging away from his eyrie among the shores of Loch-avon, and soaring aloft on the balmy air; the mountain Spey was rushing as usual through the corries and chasms of the pine-clad glen, from which the white mists and foam of its course were curling in the bright sun, above the dark fir trees of the vast Highland forest. "My father rose; he stretched his stiffened limbs and looked cautiously around him, but neither spectre nor red soldier was in sight. Behind him yawned the arched mouth of the black cavern: he shuddered as he looked upon its gloomy depth, and turning away, plunged into the forest in hopes that some loyal tenant or forester of the laird of Grant would yield him somewhat to save him from perishing of want." "Then, Dugald, this terrible encounter turns out to have been only a dream after all," said Stuart. "Nothing more," remarked Fassifern. "It was nae dream, sirs," said Dugald, forgetting his Gaelic, and resuming the Lowland dialect, "it was indeed nae dream; and as proof positive, he found his target cloven like a nut-shell by the stroke of the spirit’s blade—what nae mortal sword could hae dune; for it was covered wi’ four barkened bull-hides, and with three hundred brass studs,—and yet it was cloven in twa, and his arm felt the wecht o’ the unco’ cloure for mony a day after."