on their oppressors, and that the “devil gets villains as soon as they are dead.” Silken Sawney, the first projector of the spulzie, did not escape in the process, though he contrived a few years after to save his coin by running the country. He was the only person in Cromarty who, in the year 1745, assumed the white cockade; and no sooner had he appeared with it on the street than he was apprehended by a party of his neighbours, who were kingsmen, and incarcerated in an ale-house. A guard was mounted before the door, and, on the morrow, the poor man of silk was to be sent aboard a sloop of war then lying in the bay; but as his neighbours, when they took the precaution of mounting guard, did not think proper to call to memory that his apartment had a door of its own, which opened into a garden behind, he deemed it prudent, instead of waiting the result, to pass through it on a journey to the Highlands, and he never again returned to Cromarty. The other conspirators suffered in proportion, not to what they had perpetrated, but to what they possessed. A proprietor named Macculloch was stripped of his little patrimony, while some of his poorer companions escaped scot-free. Sandison contrived to pay his portion of the fine, and made chairs and tables for forty years after. He was deemed one of the most ingenious mechanics in the north of Scotland. I have spent whole days in the house of his grandson, half buried in dusty volumes and moth-eaten drawings which had once been his; and derived my earliest knowledge of building from Palladio’s First Book of Architecture, in the antique translation of Godfrey Richards, which, as the margins testified, he had studied with much care. At a sale of household furniture, which took place in Cromarty about thirty years ago, the auctioneer, after examining a very handsome though somewhat old-fashioned table with minute attention, recommended it to the purchasers by assuring them, in a form of speech at least as old as the days of Erasmus, that it was certainly the workmanship of either the Devil or of Donald Sandison. CHAPTER XXII. “Old sithes they had with the rumples set even, And then into a tree fast driven; And some had hatchets set on a pole-- Mischievous weapons, antic and droll. Each where they lifted tax and cess, And did the lieges sore oppress, And cocks and hens, and churns and cheese, Did _kill_ and eat when they could seize.” DUGALD GRAHAM’S _History of the Rebellion._ [Sidenote: THE FORTY-FIVE.]