t! They called me Sobersides in those days: Miver
gave me the name and kept it on me lili the very last, and yet sobriety
of spirit (in one way) was the last quality in those oh! days of no
grace to find in my nature. I liknl to sit in taverns, drinking not
deeply, but enough to keep the mood from flagging, with people of the
young heart, people fond of each other, adrift from all commercial
cunning, singing old staves and letting their fancy go free to a tunc
twanged on a Jew's-tnimp or squeezed upon a lagulie or rigged upon a
fiddle. So the merriment of I'ynree held me like a charm, and a mad whin
last seized me, and in I went, confident that my insttn of comradery
would not deceive me, and that at last I hail the boon-companion's
chance.

Its company never even stopped their clamour to look at me; the landlord
put a jug at my elbow, and a whang of bread and cheese, and I was
joining with an affected gusto in a chorus less than ten minutes after
I had been a hunted man on the edge of Moor Ran No ready to toss up a
bawbee to learn whither my road should be.

It was an orra and remarkable gathering, convened surely by the trickery
of a fantastic and vagabond providence,--"not a great many, but well
picked," as Mac-gregor the Mottled said of his band of thieves. There
were men and women to the number of a score, two or three travelling
merchants (as they called themselves, but I think in my mind they were
the kind of merchants who bargain with the dead corp on the abandoned
battle-field, or follow expeditions of war to glean the spoil from
burning homesteads); there were several gangrels, an Irishman with a
silver eye, a strolling piper with poor skill of his noble instrument,
the fiddler who was a drunken native of the place, a gipsy and his wife
and some randy women who had dropped out of the march of Montrose's
troops. Over this notable congregation presided the man of the
house--none of your fat and genial-looking gentlemen, but a long lean
personage with a lack-lustre eye. You would swear he would dampen the
joy of a penny wedding, and yet (such a deceit is the countenance) he
was a person of the finest wit and humour, otherwise I daresay Tynree
had no such wonderful party in it that night.

I sat by the fire-end and quaffed my ale, no one saying more to me for
a little than "There you are!" Well enough they knew my side in the
issue--my tartan would tell them that--but wandering bodies have no
politics beyond th