k hill and going finely, and relishing the
green of the new growth, when there came to me that sweet whistling
again, and cooried by the roadside beside a grey stone I saw a man
sitting. He was the droll figure of a man, with outlandish garb and
wee gold earrings. His teeth showed white as milk against his swarthy
face, and he had many colours about him, at his throat and his waist,
and useless tatters and tassels, but withal he had the proud bearing of
mountain folk, and level black brows.

Abreast of him we came and he bended low, but with such grace and so
much dignity that it were as though he were a king receiving a vassal.

"Have you the Gaelic?" said I in the old tongue.

"Cha nail, cha nail, cha nail," cried he, so quickly and with such
gestures of his hands that I was startled.

"Geelp," said he--"Geelp."

"Are you McGilp's man?" said I.

"Man, yass," says he, and all his body would seem to be very glad; and
then I questioned him of his whistling, and got his story from him.

By his way of it, he had been a camp-follower or servant to a
horse-soldier in the Low Countries, which was maybe true, for I will
not be denying these wandering folk have the way of horse, and he made
a play of himself to be showing how he was beaten often with the
stirrup-leather. Some time in his wanderings in the Low Countries he
fell in with "les Ecossais," and he was at the play-acting again with
his hands to be describing the Scotch soldiers, and then from some
pouch or hidie-hole about his outlandish garb he brought Dan's letter.

At that I sat on the roadside, and the Eastern man, with the rein loose
in his hand, crouched on his hunkers before me like an image.

There was much of sadness in that letter, and much of Belle the gipsy
lass, and of many wanderings from France to the Low Countries,

"Hamish, man, I'm minding the very stanes in the hill dykes and the
track o' the sheep on the hillside." Why he had been kind to the
Egyptian he told me. "Ye'll ken fine, Hamish, for what lass's
sake,"--and sent him into France with a Scotch soldier he kent,
returning there, with directions to wait at the little town on the
coast where McGilp would whiles be, and "bring you this word o' me and
a wheen things for Belle." He was asking me to see McGilp too. The
last of it was like Dan. "I'm thinking, Hamish, if the houris in his
paradise kenned the words o' the spring I've been deaving him wi', the
Egyptian would be very gre