8

HISTOEY OE ENGLAND.

CHAP.

XVIII.

1CS2.

donalds of Glencoe had not come in. The punctilious pride of■ Mac Ian was doubtless gratified by the thought that he hadcontinued to defy the government after the boastful Glengarry,the ferocious Keppoch, the magnanimous Lochiel had yielded:but he bought his gratification dear.

At length, on the thirty-first of December, he repaired toFort AVilliam, accompanied by his principal vassals, andoffered to take the oaths. To his dismay he found that therewas in the fort no person competent to administer them.Colonel Hill, the Governor, was not a magistrate; nor wasthere any magistrate nearer than Inverary. Mac Ian, now fullysensible of the folly of which he had been guilty in postponingto the very last moment an act on which his life and his estatedepended, set off for Inverary in great distress. He carriedwith him a letter from Hill to the Sheriff of Argyleshire, SirColin Campbell of Ardkinglass, a respectable gentleman, who,in the late reign, had suffered severely for his Whig principles.In this letter the Colonel expressed a goodnatured hope that,even out of season, a lost sheep, and so fine a lost sheep, wouldbe gladly received. Mac Ian made all the haste in his power,and did not stop even at his own house, though it lay nigh tothe road. But at that time a journey through Argyleshire inthe depth of winter was necessarily slow. The old man’s pro-gress up steep mountains and along boggy valleys was ob-structed by snow storms; and it was not till the sixth of Januarythat he presented himself before the Sheriff at Inverary. TheSheriff hesitated. His power, he said, was limited by theterms of the proclamation, and he did not see how he couldswear a rebel who had not submitted -within the prescribed time.Mac Ian begged earnestly and with tears that he might besworn. His people, he said, would follow his example. Ifany of them proved refractory, he w'ould himself send therecusant to prison, or ship him off for Flanders. His entreaties