, noo, the reason for Munro to be gettin'
his big share o' the siller Mac and I made, I was no minded not to ha'
another try for it myself. Next season Mac and I made our plans even
more carefully. We went to most of the same towns where business had
been bad before, and this time it was good. And I learned something a
manager could ha' told me, had he liked. Often and often it's
necessary to tak' a loss on an artist's first tour that'll be more
than made up for later. Some folk go to hear him, or see him, even
that first time. An' they tell ithers what they've missed. It was so
wi' us when we tried again. Our best audiences and our biggest success
came where we'd been most disappointed the time before. This tour was
a grand success, and once more, for less than three months of work,
Mac and I banked more than a hundred pounds apiece.

But there was more than siller to count in the profits of the tours
Mac and I made together. He became and has always remained one of my
best and dearest friends--man never had a better. And a jollier
companion I can never hope to find. We always lived together; it was
easier and cheaper, too, for us to share lodgings. And we liked to
walk together for exercise, and to tak' our amusement as well as our
work in common.

I loved to hear Mac practice. He was a true artist and a real
musician, and when he played for the sheer love of playing he was even
better, I always thought, than when he was thinking of his audience,
though he always gave an audience his best. It was just, I think, that
when there was only me to hear him he knew he could depend upon a
sympathetic listener, and he had not to worry aboot the effect his
playing was to have.

We were like a pair of boys on a holiday when we went touring together
in those days, Mac and I. We were always playing jokes on one another,
or on any other victims we could find usually on one another because
there was always something one of us wanted to get even for. But the
commonest trick was one of mine. Mac and I would come down to
breakfast, say, at a hotel, and when everyone was seated I'd start, in
a very low voice, to sing. Rather, I didn't really sing, I said, in a
low, rhythmical tone, with a sort of half tune to it, this old verse:

"And the old cow crossed the road,
The old cow crossed the road,
And the reason why it crossed the road
Was to get to the other side."

I would repeat that, over and over again, tappi