nd eyes as she spoke. She was a deeply
religious and very emotional person, and loved Barty almost as if he
were a child of her own.

Such women have strange intuitions.

Barty was often asked to repeat this astonishing performance before
skeptical people--parents of boys, visitors, etc.--who had been told
of it, and who believed he could not have been properly blindfolded;
but he could never be induced to do so.

There was no mistake about the blindfolding--I helped in it myself;
and he afterwards told me the whole thing was "aussi simple que
bonjour" if once he felt the north--for then, with his back to the
refectory door, he knew exactly the position and distance of every
tree from where he was.

"It's all nonsense about my going blind and being able to do without a
dog," he added; "I should be just as helpless as any other blind man,
unless I was in a place I knew as well as my own pocket--like this
play-ground! Besides, _I_ shan't go blind; nothing will ever happen to
_my_ eyes--they're the strongest and best in the whole school!"

He said this exultingly, dilating his nostrils and chest; and looked
proudly up and around, like Ajax defying the lightning.

"But what _do_ you feel when you feel the north, Barty--a kind of
tingling?" I asked.

"Oh--I feel where it is--as if I'd got a mariner's compass trembling
inside my stomach--and as if I wasn't afraid of anybody or anything in
the world--as if I could go and have my head chopped off and not care
a fig."

"Ah, well--I can't make it out--I give it up," I exclaimed.

"So do I," exclaims Barty.

"But tell me, Barty," I whispered--"_have_ you--have you _really_ got
a--a--_special friend above_?"

"Ask no questions and you'll get no lies," said Barty, and winked at
me one eye after the other--and went about his business, and I about
mine.

WILLIAM DUNBAR

(1465?-1530?)

A picturesque figure in a picturesque age is that of William Dunbar,
court minstrel to James IV., and as Sir Walter Scott declared, "a poet
unrivaled by any that Scotland has ever produced." Little of his
personal history is known. Probably he was a native of East Lothian,
a member of the family of the Earl of March, and a graduate of St.
Andrews University about the year 1479. After his college days he
joined the order of Franciscans and became a mendicant friar,
preaching the queer sermons of his time, and begging his way through
England and France. Yet in these pilgrimages