After the battle, and on the retreat of the Highlanders, the Lowland party were greatly enraged. They went and buried the dead, and kept their bloody shirts that they might be shown to the King, and Sir Humphrey and his friends got 220 women to ride to Edinburgh, each woman carrying on a spear as a banner a blood-stained shirt which she said had belonged to a man massacred by the MacGregors. The youths who had been killed by Hugh were of good parentage, and the indignation caused by their death was not allowed to sleep by their kinsfolk and tutors. The King was greatly enraged against the MacGregors, having had a hatred of them on account of old strifes. He appointed a day for a court of justice, and MacGregor was summoned, but durst not appear. Neither was there any one to speak for him, and in his absence he and his clan were sentenced to lose their lands and name.
[Illustration: "WHO DONE THAT?" SHOUTED MR. CUMMINGS.]
The district school-house in Hagar was very old, but it never looked so, on account of the paint. When the Selectmen concluded not to do something that ought to be done, because it would cost too much, they violently painted the school-house instead. It relieved their feelings and did not cost too much. Also, the school-house standing prominently by the cross-roads, it gave a thrifty appearance to the village.
The inside of the school-house was seldom painted by the violent Selectmen, or its individuality interfered with in any way. Its desks became more whittled from year to year, its ceiling smokier, and its blackboards dingier with adding and subtracting. The water-pail that stood over the cellar stairs was often upset for different reasons, so that now and then there was a new water-pail. The stove stood in front of the teacher's desk, and, on cold days, an enormous distance from the back seats. The stove-pipe was strung along the ceiling on precarious wires.
This stove was not an adequate stove. The sphere of its influence fell short of the back seats. It was an uncertain and variable stove. It sulked; sometimes it dropped legs and severed connections with the pipe. On windy days it shook, roared, threw sparks, and interrupted lessons. The Selectmen, namely, Deacon Crockett, Harvey Cummings, and Mr. Atherton Bell--who had been to the Legislature--were told that the stove was not an adequate stove, and denounced the school-house as a source of endless expense.