of the excited captain.
"Bah!" he responded, and drained another glass of whiskey.
"What did Kenneth Ower foretel two hundred years ago?"
"That when a _black_ Yule overtook a _black_ Laird of Ballychroan,
the race would cease."
"Well--you are the first of your family who have the name of Evan
_Dhu_--and you have no son."
"Thank Heaven, no! I care not for predictions, and Kenneth Ower
Mackenzie, the Brahn prophet, was a fool."
"He foretold strange things though."
"Such as, that oats would replace the fairies on the hill of
Tomnahourich, and that ships with sails unfurled would pass and
repass it; but the green bracken and the purple heather wave yet on
the Fairies' Hill, and we hare heard nothing of the ships."*
* The captain spoke in 1800. "Tomnahourich, the far-famed Fairies'
Hill, has been sown with oats," states the _Inverness Advertiser_ of
1859; "according to tradition, the Brahn prophet, who lived 200 years
ago, predicted that ships with unfurled sails would pass and repass
Tomnahourich; and further, that it would yet be placed under lock and
key. The first part of the prediction was verified by the opening of
the Caledonian Canal, and we seem to be on the eve of seeing the
realization of the rest by the final closing up of the Fairies'
Hill." In what succeeds I have closely followed local and oral
tradition; but the black officer was _not_ the last of his race, as
he left a daughter, who, I believe, was married in England.
"Kenneth Ower never spoke in vain," said the white-haired sergeant.
"I am too old a soldier to be terrified by silly predictions,"
exclaimed the captain, wrathfully; "so enough of this. Set forward,
men--away to the forest! Let us drink, dance, and hunt while we may!"
And quaffing off a huge jug of alcohol, with a party of gillies, whom
he had made half tipsy, he departed towards the Forest of Qaich.
Of all that band of hunters, not a man ever came down from the
Grampians again!
On that night, when the whole atmosphere seemed calm and still, a
terrific tempest, sudden as the discharge of a cannon, swept over the
mountains. For hours the forked lightning played and flashed over
Benoch-Corri-Va and the Haunted Forest of Gaich, while the
thunder-peals made the old women in every cottage and clachan totter
down on their knees to mutter a prayer for deliverance from evil and
danger, as the electric salvos hurtled over the great wooded valley,
through which the swollen Spey, the most furious of the Scottish
rivers, laden with the spoil of a hundred forests, swept with a
ceaseless roar to the German Ocean.
Over Gaich, the sky seemed all on fire. It was an expanse of crimson
flame streaked with forky green flashes; and against this steady
flush the huge Grampians stood strongly forth in sombre outline.
With night this storm passed away.
Three days after, some shepherds who, in pursuit of their scattered
flocks, ventured into the wilderness of Gaich, saw a sight, the
memory of which causes many yet to shudder, as they tell to their
grandchildren around the winter hearth the story of the Captain Dhu.
A lonely shieling, in which he and his twenty gillies took refuge,
had been destroyed by a thunderbolt. Its rafters and stones were
scattered over the forest, with the corpses of its inmates--every man
of whom had been _torn limb from limb_, and scattered far apart, as
if by the hands of some mighty fiend!
Such was the startling end of the Black Captain and his companions.
His evil reputation, the weird locality of his hunting, and the
equally weird character of this tempestuous night, have fixed the
idea deeply in the minds of the peasantry that Evan Dhu, of
Ballychroan, decoyed these twenty Badenoch men into Gaich Forest for
the sole purpose of delivering them to the fiend, in conformity with
some terrible compact; for the whole scene of the catastrophe bore
evidence of their destruction by some infernal agency, rather than,
as others averred, the levin brand of Heaven.
At times, on the returning Eve of Yule, those who have been belated
in the forest suddenly find themselves in the midst of an invisible
company of roisterers, whose laughter, shouts, imprecations, and
impious songs, fill the poor loiterers with affright; for though the
voices seem close to the ear, no one in visible: and these unearthly
bacchanalians are supposed to be the spirits of the doomed captain
and his companions.
On other occasions, screams, yells and entreaties for mercy--wild,
and thrilling, and heartrending--with the hoarse, deep baying of
infernal dogs, are swept over the waste on the wind. But since that
terrible catastrophe on Yule Eve, 1800, none pass willingly through
the Forest of Gaich alone!
NOTES.
I
THE LETTER OF SERVICE.
In the story of Farquhar Shaw, the formation of the Highland Watch
has been fully detailed; but the following is the Letter of Service
by which the Independent Companies of the Reicudan Dhu became the
43rd, and afterwards the 42nd Regiment of the Line:
"George R.--Whereas, we have thought fit that a Regiment of Foot be
forthwith formed under your command, and to consist of ten companies,
each to contain one captain, one lieutenant, one ensign, three
sergeants, three corporals, two drummers, and one hundred effective
private men; which said regiment shall be formed out of six
Independent Companies of Foot in the Highlands of North Britain,
three of which are now commanded by captains, and three by
captain-lieutenants:
"Our will and pleasure therefore is, that one sergeant, one corporal,
and fifty private men, be forthwith taken out of the three companies
commanded by captains, and ten private men from the three commanded
by captain-lieutenants, making one hundred and eighty men, who are to
be equally distributed into the four companies hereby to be raised;
and the three sergeants and three corporals draughted as aforesaid,
to be placed to such of the four companies as you shall judge proper;
and the remainder of the non-commissioned officers and private men,
wanting to complete them to the above number, to be raised in the
Highlands with all possible speed, _the men to be natives of the
country, and none other to be taken_.
"This regiment shall commence and take place according to the
establishment thereof. And of these our orders and commands, you and
the said three captains and the three captain-lieutenants, commanding
at present the six Independent Highland Companies, and all others
concerned, are to take notice, and yield obedience thereunto
accordingly.
"Given at our Court of St. James's this 7th day of November, 1739,
and in the 13th year of our reign. By His Majesty's command.
(Signed) "WM. YONGE.
"To our right-trusty and well-beloved cousin John Earl of Craufurd
and Lindsay."
Letters of service usually contain the _special conditions_ under
which troops are levied. It is worthy of remark that such are
carefully _omitted_ in the foregoing.
II.
HIGHLAND SOLDIERS.
In the war between 1755 and 1762, sixty-five thousand Scotsmen were
enlisted, according to the "Scots Magazine" for 1763, and of these a
great proportion were Highlanders, whose services were extremely
ill-requited.
"Were not the Highlanders put upon every hazardous enterprise where
nothing was to be got but broken bones, and are not all these
regiments _discarded_ now, but the 42nd?" says a writer in the
_Edinburgh Advertiser_ of 6th July, 1764. "The Scots colonel who
entered the Moro Castle* is now reduced to half-pay; while an English
general, whose avarice was the occasion of the death of many
thousands of brave men, is not only on full pay, but in possession of
one-fifth of the whole money gained at the Havannah--what proportion
does the service of this general, who received £86,000, bear to a
private soldier who got about fifty shillings, or an officer who
received about £80?**
* Lieutenant-Colonel James Stuart, who afterwards commanded at
Cuddalore, in 1789.
** Lieut.-General the Earl of Albemarle received £112,697 10s. The
writer is in error.
"The 42nd regiment consisted of two battalions and three companies,
in all 2800 men, and now (in 1764) there remain only about ninety
privates alive of the whole."
A passion for military glory and adventure, with the old patriarchal
love of the chiefs and gentlemen who officered the Highland
regiments, drew our mountain peasantry in great numbers into their
ranks. "Thus we find," according to General Stewart, whose work has
been quoted in the text, "that the whole corps embodied in the
Highlands amounted to twenty-six battalions of fencible infantry,
which, in addition to the _fifty battalions of the line_, three of
reserve and seven of militia, formed altogether a force of EIGHTY-SIX
HIGHLAND REGIMENTS embodied in the course of the four wars in which
Britain had been engaged since the Black Watch was regimented in
1740. From a first glance, allowing 1000 men to each of these
eighty-six regiments, would appear to come near the truth; but on a
closer view it will be found to be far short of the actual
number--several of the regiments had in the course of their service
treble or quadruple their original number in their ranks. Thus the
71st, the 72nd and the 73rd, during the thirty-one years they were
Highland (_i.e._ kilted), had at least 3000 Highlanders each, and
other regiments had numbers in proportion to the length and nature of
their service, both in tropical and temperate climate.
"From the commencement of the late war," according to another and
equally careful writer, "the Island of Skye alone had furnished no
fewer than 21 Lieutenant-Generals and Major-Generals; 48
Lieutenant-Colonels; 600 other commissioned officers and 10,000 foot
soldiers; 4 Governors of British colonies; 1 Governor-General; 1
Adjutant-General; 1 Chief Baron of England; and 1 Judge of the
Supreme Court of Scotland."
The game laws and expatriation of the people have now reduced the
Highlands and Isles to a wilderness, or nearly so; the clans, whose
memory is so inseparably connected with the military history of
Scotland in modern times, and with the memory of days gone by, are
swept to Australia, or the wilds of that Far West which is now the
new home of the Celtic race.
According to Wilson--
Time and tide
Have washed away like weeds upon the sands,
Crowds of the olden life's memorials;
And mid the mountains you might as well seek
For the lone site of fancy's filmy dream.
III.
THE LETTRE DE CACHET.
Of Major White's companion in misfortune, referred to in the legend
bearing the above title, the _Edinburgh Magazine_ for 1789 supplies
the following information:--
"The Earl of Mazarine is an Irish peer; he was nearly stopped at
Calais, on Friday, on his way here. He was with two other gentlemen,
his companions in misfortune, and being all extremely mean and
shabbily dressed, were suspected of being bad persons, and no one
seemed desirous of embarking in the packet with them. He was at
length obliged to declare himself. The people in the packet thought
him mad. On landing at Dover, his lordship was the first to jump out
of the boat, and in gratitude to Heaven for his deliverance,
immediately fell on his knees, and kissing the ground thrice,
exclaimed--
"God bless this land of liberty!"
This was one of the last episodes in the history of the terrible
Bastille.
THE END.