I will tell them this, and I will fling your plaid on the thorns which grow on the brink of the precipice, that they may believe my words.

They will believe, and they will return to the Dun of the double-crest; for though the Saxon drum can call the living to die, it cannot recall the dead to their slavish standard.

Then will we travel together far northward to the salt lakes of Kintail, and place glens and mountains betwixt us and the sons of Dermid.

We will visit the shores of the dark lake; and my kinsmen--for was not my mother of the children of Kenneth, and will they not remember us with the old love ?--my kinsmen will receive us with the affection of the olden time, which lives in those distant glens, where the Gael still dwell in their nobleness, unmingled with the churl Saxons, or with the base brood that are their tools and their slaves." The energy of the language, somewhat allied to hyperbole, even in its most ordinary expressions, now seemed almost too weak to afford Elspat the means of bringing out the splendid picture which she presented to her son of the land in which she proposed to him to take refuge.

Yet the colours were few with which she could paint her Highland paradise.
"The hills," she said, "were higher and more magnificent than those of Breadalbane--Ben Cruachan was but a dwarf to Skooroora.