The King gave my ancestors their title and rank; and these shall never prevent my acting, in the royal cause, under any one who is better qualified than myself to be a commander-in-chief.

Least of all, shall any miserable jealousy prevent me from placing my hand and sword under the guidance of the bravest, the most loyal, the most heroic spirit among our Scottish nobility." "Pity," said Sir Duncan Campbell, "that you cannot add to this panegyric the farther epithets of the most steady, and the most consistent.

But I have no purpose of debating these points with you, my lord," waving his hand, as if to avoid farther discussion; "the die is cast with you; allow me only to express my sorrow for the disastrous fate to which Angus M'Aulay's natural rashness, and your lordship's influence, are dragging my gallant friend Allan here, with his father's clan, and many a brave man besides." "The die is cast for us all, Sir Duncan," replied Allan, looking gloomy, and arguing on his own hypochondriac feelings; "the iron hand of destiny branded our fate upon our forehead long ere we could form a wish, or raise a finger in our own behalf.

Were this otherwise, by what means does the Seer ascertain the future from those shadowy presages which haunt his waking and his sleeping eye?
Nought can be foreseen but that which is certain to happen." Sir Duncan Campbell was about to reply, and the darkest and most contested point of metaphysics might have been brought into discussion betwixt two Highland disputants, when the door opened, and Annot Lyle, with her clairshach in her hand, entered the apartment.

The freedom of a Highland maiden was in her step and in her eye; for, bred up in the closest intimacy with the Laird of M'Aulay and his brother, with Lord Menteith, and other young men who frequented Darnlinvarach, she possessed none of that timidity which a female, educated chiefly among her own sex, would either have felt, or thought necessary to assume, on an occasion like the present.
Her dress partook of the antique, for new fashions seldom penetrated into the Highlands, nor would they easily have found their way to a castle inhabited chiefly by men, whose sole occupation was war and the chase.