But he could go further and
further from him.
As soon as he was able, he resumed his journey westward, and at
length reached his native glen, the wildest spot in all the island.
There he found indeed the rush of the torrents and the call of the
winds unchanged, but when his soul cried out in its agonies, they
went on with the same song that had soothed his childhood; for the
heart of the suffering man they had no response. Days passed before
he came upon a creature who remembered him; for more than twenty
years were gone, and a new generation had come up since he forsook
the glen. Worst of all, the clan spirit was dying out, the family
type of government all but extinct, the patriarchal vanishing in
a low form of the feudal, itself already in abject decay. The hour
of the Celt was gone by, and the long wandering raven, returning
at last, found the ark it had left afloat on the waters dry and
deserted and rotting to dust. There was not even a cottage in which
he could hide his head. The one he had forsaken when cruelty and
crime drove him out, had fallen to ruins, and now there was nothing
of it left but its foundations. The people of the inn at the mouth
of the valley did their best for him, but he learned by accident
that they had Campbell connections, and, rising that instant, walked
from it for ever.
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