We considered ourselves very fortunate in walking from John
o' Groat's to Land's End, instead of from Land's End to John o' Groat's,
for by the time we finished deep snow might have covered these Northern
altitudes. How those poor women and children must have suffered at the
time of the massacre of Glencoe, when, as Sir Walter Scott writes--
flying from their burning huts, and from their murderous visitors,
the half-naked fugitives committed themselves to a winter morning of
darkness, snow, and storm, amidst a wilderness the most savage in the
Western Highlands, having a bloody death behind them, and before them
tempest, famine, and desolation when some of them, bewildered by the
snow-wreaths, sank in them to rise no more!
[Illustration: BRIDGE OF ORCHY.]
They were doubtless ignorant of the danger they were in, even as they
escaped up the glen, practically the only way of escape from Glencoe,
for Duncanson had arranged for four hundred soldiers to be at the top
end of the pass at four o'clock that morning, the hour at which the
massacre was to begin at the other end. Owing to the heavy fall of snow,
however, the soldiers did not arrive until eleven o'clock in the
forenoon--long after the fugitives had reached places of safety.
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