Page:Scott - Tales of my Landlord - 3rd series - 1819.djvu/149

Rh out a feeling of degradation, to take service with the intruding Lowlander, who, though a Saxon, she said, had proved a kind man to her. This unexpected meeting with his sister seemed a cure for all the disappointments which it had been Serjeant More's lot to encounter, although it was not without a reluctant tear that he heard told, as a Highland woman alone could tell it, the story of the expatriation of his kinsmen.

She narrated at length the vain offers they had made of advanced rent, the payment of which must have reduced them to the extremity of poverty, which they were yet contented to face, for permission to live and die on their native soil. Nor did Janet forget the portents which had announced the departure of the Celtic race, and the arrival of the strangers. For two years previous to the emigration, when the night wind howled down the pass of Ballachra, its notes were distinctly modelled to the tune of, "Ha til mi tulidh," (we return no more,) with which the emigrants