“Our route, though leading toward the lake, had hitherto been so much shaded by wood that we only from time to time obtained a glimpse of that beautiful sheet of water. But the road now suddenly emerged from the forest ground, and, winding close by the margin of the loch, afforded us a full view of its spacious mirror, which now, the breeze having totally subsided, reflected in still magnificence the high dark heathy mountains, huge grey rocks and shaggy banks, by which it is encircled. The hills now sank on its margin so closely, and were so broken and precipitous, as to afford no passage except just upon the narrow line of the track which we occupied and which was overhung with rocks, from which we might have been destroyed merely by rolling down stones, without much possibility of offering resistance. Add to this that as the road winded round every promontory and bay which indented the lake, there was rarely a possibility of seeing a hundred yards before us.”
It was when the party had reached a spot where the path rose in zigzags and made its slippery way across the face of a steep slaty cliff that they suddenly discovered they were in an ambuscade under the command of Helen Macgregor herself. The desperate fight that followed, all in favour of the outlaws who commanded the situation; the ludicrous plight of the fat little Bailie, who, caught by the back of the coat on a projecting thorn-bush, swung in mid-air, “where he dangled not unlike the sign of the Golden Fleece over the door of a mercer in the Trongate of his native city”—are not these things writ in the ever-enduring pages of _Rob Roy_? More awful was the doom of Morris the Gauger, or Exciseman, who was dragged out, condemned as a spy, and drowned by the aid of a large stone bound in a plaid about his neck. “Half naked and thus manacled, they hurled him into the lake, there about twelve feet deep, with a loud halloo of vindictive triumph, above which, however, his last death shriek, the yell of mortal agony, was distinctly heard.”
The lake thus woven into the tale is supposed to be Loch Ard. The Falls of Ledard, at the north-western end, are the falls described by Scott in _Waverley_, as he himself has owned, though it must be confessed in so doing he lifted them from their setting. Flora MacIvor’s song—