ere reassured by hearing
him run rapidly towards us, calling, "Stop, if you please! Have you
anything on just now--are you busy?"

We answered that we were quite at leisure.

"Then would you mind coming in to help us play 'Sir Patrick Spens'?
There aren't enough of us to do it nicely."

This confidence was touching, and luckily it was not in the least
misplaced. Playing 'Sir Patrick Spens' was exactly in our line, little
as he suspected it.

"Come and help?" I said. "Simply delighted! Do come, Fanny dear. How can
we get over the wall?"

"I'll show you the good broken place!" cried Sir Apple-Cheek; and
following his directions we scrambled through, while Rafe took off his
Highland bonnet ceremoniously and handed us down to earth.

"Hurrah! now it will be something like fun! Do you know 'Sir Patrick
Spens'?"

"Every word of it. Don't you want us to pass an examination before you
allow us in the game?"

"No," he answered gravely; "it's a great help, of course, to know it,
but it isn't necessary. I keep the words in my pocket to prompt Dandie,
and the Wrig can only say two lines, she's so little." (Here he produced
some tattered leaves torn from a book of ballads.) "We've done it many
a time, but this is a new Dunfermline Castle, and we are trying the
play in a different way. Rafe is the king, and Dandie is the 'eldern
knight,'--you remember him?"

"Certainly; he sat at the king's right knee."

"Yes, yes, that's the one! Then Rafe is Sir Patrick part of the time,
and I the other part, because everybody likes to be him; but there's
nobody left for the 'lords o' Noroway' or the sailors, and the Wrig is
the only maiden to sit on the shore, and she always forgets to comb her
hair and weep at the right time."

The forgetful and placid Wrig (I afterwards learned that this is a Scots
word for the youngest bird in the nest) was seated on the grass, with
her fat hands full of pink thyme and white wild woodruff. The sun shone
on her curly flaxen head. She wore a dark blue cotton frock with white
dots, and a short-sleeved pinafore; and though she was utterly useless
from a dramatic point of view, she was the sweetest little Scotch
dumpling I ever looked upon. She had been tried and found wanting in
most of the principal parts of the ballad, but when left out of the
performance altogether she was wont to scream so lustily that all
Crummylowe rushed to her assistance.

"Now let us practise a bit to see if we know what