attacking them, so you need have no fear."

"We shall not be afraid, Colonel Campbell, our confidence in you is
absolute; but do you not think that you are running a great risk
in attacking a force some forty times as large as your own?"

"One cannot call it a force, it is simply a mob, and a mob that
has suffered a terrible repulse, and the loss of three or four
hundred men tonight. We shall take them by surprise. I am going to
mount all the tenants. MacIntosh tells me that they have all been
drilled as cavalry as well as infantry. He, with the twenty men
of the regular garrison on foot and ten of the tenants, will make
straight for the guns. I shall be with the horsemen, and as soon
as we have scattered the mob, we will harness the horses to the guns
and bring them up here, so that I shall strengthen the castle as
well as weaken the peasants."

The tenants were all informed of what was going to be done.

"It will be to your benefit as well as ours," he said, "for you
may be sure that in the morning, if they give up the idea of again
attacking us, they will scatter all over the estates and sack and
burn every house, whereas if we succeed in dispersing them, no
small portion of them will at once scatter to their homes, and the
rest will take care not to come near this neighbourhood again."

At twelve o'clock MacIntosh sent a man to say that the road down
was clear, and that three hundred and twenty dead bodies had been
thrown over. At three o'clock in the morning the horses, round
whose hoofs pieces of sacking had been tied, were led across the