of each other, so that if
anyone had been at so much pains as overhear us, he must have supposed
us the most egotistical persons in the world. It befell one day when we
were at this practice, that we came on a discourse of friends and
friendship, and I think now that we were sailing near the wind. We said
what a fine thing friendship was, and how little we had guessed of it,
and how it made life a new thing, and a thousand covered things of the
same kind that will have been said, since the foundation of the world,
by young folk in the same predicament. Then we remarked upon the
strangeness of that circumstance, that friends came together in the
beginning as if they were there for the first time, and yet each had
been alive a good while, losing time with other people.

"It is not much that I have done," said she, "and I could be telling you
the five-fifths of it in two-three words. It is only a girl I am, and
what can befall a girl, at all events? But I went with the clan in the
year '45. The men marched with swords and firelocks, and some of them in
brigades in the same set of tartan; they were not backward at the
marching, I can tell you. And there were gentlemen from the Low Country,
with their tenants mounted and trumpets to sound, and there was a grand
skirling of war-pipes. I rode on a little Highland horse on the right
hand of my father, James More, and of Glengyle himself. And here is one
fine thing that I remember, that Glengyle kissed me in the face, because
(says he) 'my kinswoman, you are the only lady of the clan that has come
out,' and me a little maid of maybe twelve years old! I saw Prince
Charlie too, and the blue eyes of him; he was pretty indeed! I had his
hand to kiss in the front of the army. O, well, these were the good
days, but it is all like a dream that I have seen and then awakened. It
went what way you very well know; and these were the worst days of all,
when the red-coat soldiers were out, and my father and my uncles lay in
the hill, and I was to be carrying them their meat in the middle night,
or at the short side of day when the cocks crow. Yes, I have walked in
the night, many's the time, and my heart great in me for terror of the
darkness. It is a strange thing I will never have been meddled with a
bogle; but they say a maid goes safe. Next there was my uncle's
marriage, and that was a dreadful affair beyond all. Jean Kay was that
woman's name; and she had me in the room with her that nig