it, and indeed I have seen it in his hands. News came to
Durrisdeer of course, by the common report, as it goes travelling
through a country, a thing always wonderful to me. By that means
the family learned more of the Master's favour with the Prince, and
the ground it was said to stand on: for by a strange condescension
in a man so proud - only that he was a man still more ambitious -
he was said to have crept into notability by truckling to the
Irish. Sir Thomas Sullivan, Colonel Burke and the rest, were his
daily comrades, by which course he withdrew himself from his own
country-folk. All the small intrigues he had a hand in fomenting;
thwarted my Lord George upon a thousand points; was always for the
advice that seemed palatable to the Prince, no matter if it was
good or bad; and seems upon the whole (like the gambler he was all
through life) to have had less regard to the chances of the
campaign than to the greatness of favour he might aspire to, if, by
any luck, it should succeed. For the rest, he did very well in the
field; no one questioned that; for he was no coward.

The next was the news of Culloden, which was brought to Durrisdeer
by one of the tenants' sons - the only survivor, he declared, of
all those that had gone singing up the hill. By an unfortunate
chance John Paul and Macconochie had that very morning found the
guinea piece - which was the root of all the evil - sticking in a
holly bush; they had been "up the gait," as the servants say at
Durrisdeer, to the change-house; and if they had little left of the
guinea, they had less of their wits. What must John Paul do but
burst into the hall where the family sat at dinner, and cry the
news to them that "Tam Macmorland was but new lichtit at the door,
and - wirra, wirra - there were nane to come behind him"?