Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/36

7, 1860.]

time was dim and dark in the distance when Christianity was in its tender youth and indulged in the gallant romance of the Crusades. The place is one rich now in history and tradition, rich in legends as the broad dim strath is bountiful in woods and corn, and wild and strange in story as its dens are dreary in their heathy solitudes, and its linns black cauldrons of horror.

But the time was not come: the Laird of Craig had not murdered his man and seen the Evil One leaping and grinning from his lurking-place in the cave by the Reeky Linn. The brave, bold matron had not stood faithful to her trust on “the hie castle wa’,” and, in the name of her absent husband, defied “Argyle and a’ his men,” and his cannon planted on the brae across the water, and made to play on her fortress till it was a shattered shell, and afterwards lain down “to dee” at the Kames of Airlie, where the smoke of the burning of hearth and roof-tree was carried to her by the cruel wind. Even Lady Dorothy had not loaded and fired the arquebuss, through the loophole in the gateway meeting the portcullis, at the wild Highland caterans. The lament had not been uttered over “the gracious gude Lord Ogilvie,” fallen at Harlaw; nor the great sword of Deuchar of Deuchar carried back, but not loosed from his grasp, by the squire who hacked off his strong right hand as it lay clenching the hilt by his side in the ranks of Saxon and Celtic dead, and brought it home as a token to his lady, sitting watching in her chamber. Only the ambitious learned Knights Templars held the lands of Templeton, and men already muttered darkly, and women whispered with white lips, how Gilchrist Lord of Angus had stabbed to the heart his false wife, the sister of a king, and her blood was washed out by the pure water trickling from the cold well, where the sun’s rays never fell