centuries before history began, when the
Picts and Gaels I have read of fought together among the billowy
mountains; or of the Romans building Hadrian's wall against the "little
dark men"; or of the many heroes, Scottish and English, who had drenched
the heather with their blood since then; or perhaps of himself, and the
days of his boyhood when he said good-bye to bonny Scotland and went to
try his fortune in the New World. Whatever his thoughts may have been,
they made his face at first sad, then hard; I fancied that it was of
himself as a boy he thought, and of his father and mother, whom he will
not see when he goes home; so to bring him out of his brown study I
began to tell him a story Mrs. Muir had told me about the border. It was
the tale of the last Picts, and the secret of the heather ale. All, all
the mysterious little dark people had been swept away in a great
massacre by the Scots after centuries of fighting with the Romans; and
only a father and son were left alive. "Give me thy Pictish secret of
brewing heather ale," said the King of the Scots, when the pair were
brought before him, "and I may perhaps spare thee and thy son."

Then the dark Pict shut his eyes for a moment, and thought what to do.
He thought that the King would kill him and his son when he had their
secret; and he thought of the mead which had the power of wafting the
Picts to the Land of Pleasant Dreams.

From the bonny bells of heather,
They brewed a drink langsyne,
Was sweeter far than honey,
Was stronger far than wine.
They brewed it and they drank it,
And lay in blessed swound
For days and days together,
In their dwellings underground.

When he had thought with his eyes shut, the Pict said that he could not
tell the secret while his son lived, because of the shame he would feel
that his own flesh and blood should know him a traitor. He said this
because he believed they would kill the boy quickly without torture; and
the old man was right, for they bound his son hand and foot, and flung
him out to sea. "Now tell us the secret," they said. But the Pict only
laughed and answered, "Now I will not tell, because there is nothing
more you can do to hurt me." So they killed him quickly too, in their
rage, and the secret of the heather ale died with him.

Though he liked the story, the obstinate man argued that the last of the
Picts were not really killed in this or any other way; that they had
s