"I heard a soldier sing your songs in
the ship Archangel of Leith that took us to Elsinore."

He turned with a grateful eye from M'Iver to me, and I felt that I had
one friend now in Badenoch.

"Do you tell me?" he asked, a very child in his pleasure, that John
Splendid told me after he had not the heart to mar. "Which one did they
sing--'The Harp of the Trees' or 'Macrannul Og's Lament'? I am sure it
would be the Lament: it is touched with the sorrow of the starless
night on a rain-drummed, wailing sea. Or perhaps they knew--the gentle
hearts--my 'Farewell to the Fisher.' I made it with yon tremor of joy,
and it is telling of the far isles beyond Uist and Barra, and the Seven
Hunters, and the white sands of Colomkill."

M'Iver sat down on the wayside and whittled a stick with a pretence at
patience I knew he could scarcely feel, for we were fools to be dallying
thus on the way in broad morning when we should be harking back to our
friends as secretly as the fox.

"Were you on the ocean?" he asked the bard, whose rapture was not
abated.

"Never," said he, "but I know Linnhe and Loch Eil and the fringe of
Morar."

"Mere dubs," said M'Iver, pleasantly--"mere dubs or ditches. Now I,
Barbreck, have been upon the deeps, tossed for days at hazard without a
headland to the view. I may have made verse on the experience,--I'll not
say yea or nay to that,--but I never gave a lochan credit for washing
the bulged sides of the world."

"You hadn't fancy for it, my good fellow," said the bard, angry again.
"I forgot to say that I saw Loch Finne too, and the Galley of Lorn
taking MacCailein off from his castle. I'm making a song on that now."

"Touched!" thinks I, for it was a rapier-point at my comrade's very
marrow. He reddened at once, pulled down his brows, and scanned the bard
of Keppoch, who showed his knowledge of his advantage.

"If I were you," said John in a little, "I would not put the finish on
that ditty till I learned the end of the transaction. Perhaps MacCailein
(and God bless my chief!) is closer on Lochiel and Lochaber to-day than
you give him credit for."

"Say nothing about that," said I warningly in English to my friend,
never knowing (what I learned on a later occasion) that John Lorn had
the language as well as myself.

"When MacCailein comes here," said the bard, "he'll get a Badenoch
welcome."

"And that is the thief's welcome, the shirt off his very back," cried
M'Iver.

"Off his back very