Main. He gave a verse
of it, a wild, sad thing, with tears in it and the joy of battle. After
that we all sang, all but me, who have no voice. Bertrand had a lay of
Normandy, about a lady who walked in the apple-orchards and fell in
love with a wandering minstrel; and Donaldson sang a rough ballad of
Virginia, in which a man weighs the worth of his wife against a tankard
of apple-jack. Grey sang an English song about the north-country maid
who came to London, and a bit of the chanty of the Devon men who sacked
Santa Fe and stole the Almirante's daughter. As for Elspeth, she sang
to a soft Scots tune the tale of the Lady of Cassilis who followed the
gipsy's piping. In it the gipsy tells of what he can offer the lady,
and lo! it was our own case!--

"And ye shall wear no silken gown,
No maid shall bind your hair;
The yellow broom shall be your gem,
Your braid the heather rare.

"Athwart the moor, adown the hill,
Across the world away!
The path is long for happy hearts
That sing to greet the day,
My love,
That sing to greet the day."

I remember, too, the last verse of it:--

"And at the last no solemn stole
Shall on thy breast be laid;
No mumbling priest shall speed thy soul,
No charnel vault thee shade.
But by the shadowed hazel copse,
Aneath the greenwood tree,
Where airs are soft and waters sing,
Thou'lt ever sleep by me,
My love,
Thou'lt ever sleep by me."

Then we fell to talking about the things in the West that no man had
yet discovered, and Shalah, to whom our songs were nothing, now lent an
ear.

"The first Virginians," said Grey, "thought that over the hills lay the
western ocean and the road to Cathay. I do not know, but I am confident
that but a little way west we should come to water. A great river or
else the ocean."

Ringan differed. He held that the land of America was very wide in
those parts, as wide as south of the isthmus where no man had yet
crossed it. Then he told us of a sea-captain who had travelled inland
in Mexico for five weeks and come to a land where gold was as common as
chuckiestones, and a great people dwelt who worshipped a god who lived
in a mountain. And he spoke of the holy city of Manoa, which Sir Walter
Raleigh sought, and which many had seen from far hill-tops. Likewise of
the wonderful kings who once dwelt i