father of him must have been a well-fared and pretty man,"
said John, very promptly, not a bit abashed by the homeliness of the
youth, who was the plainest of the nock, with a freckled skin, a low
hang-dog brow, and a nose like the point of a dirk.

"He was that," said the woman, fondly--"the finest man in the parish.
He had a little lameness, but----"

"I have a bit of a halt myself," said M'I ver, with his usual folly;
"and I'm sure I'm none the worse for it."

The oldest boy sat up in bed and gloomed at us very sullenly. He could
scarcely be expected to understand the conceits of M'Iver's tale about
his lameness, that any one with eyes could behold had no existence.

"But I never think of my man," the woman went on, "but as I saw him
first before he met with his lameness. Eyes are a kind of doubtful
blessing too in some ways. Mine have forgotten all the ugly things
they knew, and in my recollection are but many bonny things: my man was
always as young to me as when he came courting in a new blue bonnet and
a short coat; my children will be changing to every one but to me."

Stewart, with his own appetite satisfied, was acting lackey to the
gentlemen in the byre--fetching out cogies of milk and whangs of
bear-meal bannock, and the most crisp piquant white cheese ever I put
tooth to. He was a man without a conscience, and so long as his own ends
and the ends of his friends were served, he would never scruple to empty
the woman's girnel or toom her last basin, and leave her no morsel of
food or drink at the long-run. But M'Iver and I put an end to that, and
so won, as we thought, to the confidence of the elder lad in the bed,
who had glunched low-browed among his franker brethren.

We slept for some hours, the seven of us, among the bracken of the byre,
wearied out and unable to go farther that night, even if the very dogs
were at our heels. We slept sound, I'm sure, all but M'Iver, whom,
waking twice in the chill of the night, I found sitting up and listening
like any sentinel.

"What are you watching for there?" I asked him on the second time.

"Nothing at all, Colin, nothing at all. I was aye a poor sleeper at
the best, and that snore of Rob Stewart is the very trump of the next
world."

It was in the dawn again he confessed to his real apprehension,--only to
my private ear, for he wished no more to alarm the others by day than to
mar my courtship of slumber by night.

"The fact is," said he, "I'm not very