beyond it by two or three feet, and looked with
an air of triumph to Henry, who again smiled in reply.

"Will you mend that?" said the Gael, offering our smith the hammer.

"Not with that child's toy," said Henry, "which has scarce weight to
fly against the wind. Jannekin, fetch me Sampson; or one of you help the
boy, for Sampson is somewhat ponderous."

The hammer now produced was half as heavy again as that which the
Highlander had selected as one of unusual weight. Norman stood
astonished; but he was still more so when Henry, taking his position,
swung the ponderous implement far behind his right haunch joint, and
dismissed it from his hand as if it had flown from a warlike engine. The
air groaned and whistled as the mass flew through it. Down at length it
came, and the iron head sunk a foot into the earth, a full yard beyond
the cast of Norman.

The Highlander, defeated and mortified, went to the spot where the
weapon lay, lifted it, poised it in his hand with great wonder, and
examined it closely, as if he expected to discover more in it than a
common hammer. He at length returned it to the owner with a melancholy
smile, shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head as the smith asked
him whether he would not mend his cast.

"Norman has lost too much at the sport already," he replied. "She has
lost her own name of the Hammerer. But does her own self, the Gow Chrom,
work at the anvil with that horse's load of iron?"

"You shall see, brother," said Henry, leading the way to the smithy.
"Dunter," he said, "rax me that bar from the furnace"; and uplifting
Sampson, as he called the monstrous hammer, he plied the metal with a
hundred strokes from right to left--now with the right hand, now with
the left, now with both, with so much strength at once and dexterity,
that he worked off a small but beautifully proportioned horseshoe in
half the time that an ordinary smith would have taken for the same
purpose, using a more manageable implement.

"Oigh--oigh!" said the Highlander, "and what for would you be fighting
with our young chief, who is far above your standard, though you were
the best smith ever wrought with wind and fire?"

"Hark you!" said Henry; "you seem a good fellow, and I'll tell you the
truth. Your master has wronged me, and I give him this harness freely
for the chance of fighting him myself."

"Nay, if he hath wronged you he must meet you," said the life guardsman.
"To do a man wrong takes the eagle