I'll be bound that if there were another rising (which Heaven forfend!) you'd on with the kilt and be off with another Stuart, just as Neil Leslie went off with the young Pretender—luckless loon that he was. But I'll not have it, look you. I'll have none of your Jacobite thoughts here; no, not even so much as the whistling of their inflammatory tunes!"
Colin raised his eyes and glanced furtively at the old claymore that was suspended over the door, crossed by a rusty Lochaber axe. One might have seen by the sudden gleam in his blue eyes that the lad had some lingering sympathy with the romantic adventurer of whose lost cause his grandfather had spoken so contemptuously.
"One rebel in the family has been quite enough, and more than enough," went on Sir Donald. "But for Neil Leslie we might now be living in comfort and luxury instead of in poverty. We now feed upon porridge and oaten bannocks instead of good wholesome beef and venison; we drink weak milk instead of wine. Our dwelling is a poor broken-down ruin instead of, as it once was, a lordly castle fit for a king. Look at our lands; they are wide, but they bear no harvest, for we cannot afford to cultivate them. Our stables are empty; our flocks have been reduced to a few skinny sheep that find no food upon the barren ground. Even the grouse and the plovers have deserted us. And it is all the work of Neil Leslie. My very blood simmers when I think of him, the rebel rascal! the scoundrel! the thief!"
"Thief?" echoed Colin quickly. "Thief, grandfather?"
"Ay, thief," growled the old man in an angrier tone. "He robbed his own father—my father. All the hard-earned and hard-saved money that my father had put aside for his descendants—for me as his eldest son, and for you in your turn, although that was long, long before you were born—was stolen by Neil Leslie, and by him
