fty Lad'; I can make passable poetry by
word of mouth; I can speak the English and the French, and I have seen
enough of courtiers to know that half their canons are to please and
witch the eye of women in a way that I could undertake to do by my looks
alone and some good-humour. Show me a beast on hill or in glen I have
not the history of; and if dancing, singing, the sword, the gun, the
pipes--ah, not the pipes,--it's my one envy in the world to play the
bagpipes with some show of art and delicacy, and I cannot. Queer is
that, indeed, and I so keen on them! I would tramp right gaily a night
and a day on end to hear a scholar fingering 'The Glen is Mine.'"

There was a witless vanity about my friend that sat on him almost like
a virtue. He made parade of his crafts less, I could see, because he
thought much of them, than because he wanted to keep himself on an
equality with me. In the same way, as I hinted before, he never, in all
the time of our wanderings after, did a thing well before me but he bode
to keep up my self-respect by maintaining that I could do better, or at
least as good.

"Books, I say," he went on, as we clinked heels on the causeway-stones,
and between my little bit cracks with old friends in the by-going,--
"books, I say, have spoiled Mac-Cailein's stomach. Ken ye what he told me
once? That a man might readily show more valour in a conclusion come
to in the privacy of his bed-closet than in a victory won on the field.
That's what they teach by way of manly doctrine down there in the
new English church, under the pastorage of Maister Alexander Gordon,
chaplain to his lordship and minister to his lordship's people! It must
be the old Cavalier in me, but somehow (in your lug) I have no broo of
those Covenanting cattle from the low country--though Gordon's a good
soul, there's no denying."

"Are you Catholic?" I said, in a surprise.

"What are you yourself?" he asked, and then he flushed, for he saw
a little smile in my face at the transparency of his endeavour to be
always on the pleasing side.

"To tell the truth," he said, "I'm depending on salvation by reason of a
fairly good heart, and an eagerness to wrong no man, gentle or semple. I
love my fellows, one and all, not offhand as the Catechism enjoins, but
heartily, and I never saw the fellow, carl or king, who, if ordinary
honest and cheerful, I could not lie heads and thraws with at a
camp-fire. In matters of strict ritual, now,--ha--urn!"