ou dare tell me that the sheiling
singers on Loch Finneside have never heard my 'Harp of the Trees'? If
there's a finer song of its kind in all Albainn I've yet to learn it."

"If I heard it," said John, "I've forgotten it."

"Name of God!" cried the bard in amaze, "you couldn't; it goes so"--and
he hummed the tune that every one in Argile and the west had been
singing some years before.

We pretended to listen with eagerness to recall a single strain of
it, and affected to find no familiar note. He tried others of his
budget--some rare and beautiful songs, I must frankly own: some we knew
by fragments; some we had sung in the wood of Creag Dubh--but to each
and all John Splendid raised a vacant face and denied acquaintance.

"No doubt," said he, "they are esteemed in the glens of Keppoch, but
Argile is fairly happy without them. Do you do anything else for a
living but string rhymes?"

The bard was in a sweat of vexation. "I've wandered far," said he, "and
you beat all I met in a multitude of people. Do you think the stringing
of rhymes so easy that a man should be digging and toiling in the field
and the wood between his _duans_?"

"I think," said Splendid (and it was the only time a note of earnestness
was in his utterance)--"I think his songs would be all the better for
some such manly interregnum. You sing of battles: have you felt the
blood rush behind the eyes and the void of courageous alarm at the
pit of the stomach? You hum of grief: have you known the horror of a
desolate home? Love,--sir, you are young, young------"

"Thanks be with you," said the bard; "your last word gives me the clue
to my answer to your first I have neither fought nor sorrowed in the
actual fact; but I have loved, not a maid (perhaps), nor in errant
freaks of the mind, but a something unnameable and remote, with
a bounteous overflowing of the spirit. And that way I learned the
splendour of war as I sat by the fire; and the widows of my fancy wring
my heart with a sorrow as deep as the ruined homes your clan have made
in my country could confer."

I'm afraid I but half comprehended his meaning, but the rapture of his
eye infected me like a glisk of the sun. He was a plain, gawky, nervous
man, very freckled at the hands, and as poor a leg in the kilt as well
could be. He was fronting us with the unspoken superiority of the fowl
on its own midden, but he had a most heart-some and invigorating glow.

"John Lorn, John Lom!" I cried,