A Sergeant o' Pikes, I have pushed and have parried O (My heart still at tether in bonny Glenshee); Weary the marches made, sad the towns harried O, But in fancy the heather was aye at my knee: The hill-berry mellowing, stag o' ten bellowing, The song o' the fold and the tale by the hearth, Bairns at the crying and auld folks a-dying, The Hielan's sent wi' me to fight round the earth!
O the Hielan's, the Hielan's, praise God for His favour, That ane sae unworthy should heir sic estate, That gi'ed me the zest o the sword, and the savour That lies in the loving as well as the hate. Auld age may subdue me, a grim death be due me, For even a Sergeant o' Pikes maun depart, But I'll never complain o't, whatever the pain o't, The Hielan's, the Hielan's were aye at my heart!
We closed in our night's diversion with the exercise of prayer, wherein two clerics led our devotion, one Master Mungo Law, a Lowlander, and the other his lordship's chaplain--Master Alexander Gordon, who had come on this expedition with some fire of war in his face, and never so much as a stiletto at his waist.
They prayed a trifle long and drearily the pair of them, and both in the English that most of our clansmen but indifferently understood. They prayed as prayed David, that the counsel of Ahithophel might be turned to foolishness; and "Lo," they said, "be strong and courageous; fear not, neither be afraid of the King of Ashur, neither for all the multitude that is with him; for there be more with us than with him," and John Splendid turned to me at this with a dry laugh.
"Colin, my dear," said he, "thus the hawk upon the mountain-side, and the death of the winged eagle to work up a valour for! 'There be more with us than with him.' I never heard it so bluntly put before. But perhaps Heaven will forgive us the sin of our caution, seeing that half our superior number are but Lowland levies."
And all night long deer belled to deer on the braes of Glen Noe.
We might well be at our prayers. Appin paid dearly for its merriment in the land of Cailein Mor, and the MacDonalds were mulct most generously for our every hoof and horn. For when we crossed Loch Etive there came behind us from the ruined glens of Lower Lorn hordes of shepherds, hunters, small men of small families, who left their famished dens and holes, hunger sharping them at the nose, the dead bracken of concealment in their hair, to join in the vengeance on the cause of their distress. Without chieftains or authority, they came in savage bands, affronting the sea with their shouts as they swam or ferried; they made up with the wildest of our troops, and ho, ro! for the plaids far and wide on the errands of Hell. In that clear, cold, white weather--the weather of the badger's dream, as our proverb calls it--we brought these glens unfriendly, death in the black draught and the red wine of fire. A madness of hate seized on us; we glutted our appetites to the very gorge. I must give Argile the credit of giving no licence to our on-goings. He rode after us with his Lowlanders, protesting, threatening, cajoling in vain. Many a remonstrance, too, made Gordon, many an opening fire he stamped out in cot and bam. But the black smoke of the granary belching against the white hills, or the kyloe, houghed and maimed, roaring in its agony, or the fugitive brought bloody on his knees among the rocks--God's mercy!