"If you had your wish, Gavin, when and how would you go into Inneraora
town after those weary years away?"

"Man, I've made that up long syne," said he, and the tear was at his
cheek. "Let me go into it cannily at night-fall from the Cromalt end,
when the boys and girls were dancing on the green to the pipes at the
end of a harvest-day. Them in a reel, with none of the abulziements of
war about me, but a plain civil lad like the rest, I would join in the
strathspey and kiss two or three of the girls ere ever they jaloused a
stranger was among them."

Poor Gavin, good Gavin! he came home no way at all to his mother and his
mountains; but here was I, with some of his wish for my fortune, riding
cannily into Inneraora town in the dark.

It is wonderful how travel, even in a marching company of cavaliers of
fortune, gives scope to the mind. When I set foot, twelve years before
this night I speak of, on the gabert that carried me down to Dunbarton
on my way to the Humanities classes, I could have sworn I was leaving
a burgh most large and wonderful. The town houses of old Stonefield,
Craignish, Craignure, Asknish, and the other cadets of Clan Campbell,
had such a strong and genteel look; the windows, all but a very few,
had glass in every lozen, every shutter had a hole to let in the morning
light, and each door had its little ford of stones running across the
gutter that sped down the street, smelling fishily a bit, on its way to
the shore. For me, in those days, each close that pierced the tall lands
was as wide and high as a mountain _eas_, the street itself seemed broad
and substantial, crowded with people worth kenning for their graces and
the many things they knew.

I came home now on this night of nights with Munchen and Augsburg, and
the fine cities of all the France, in my mind, and I tell you I could
think shame of this mean rickle of stones I had thought a town, were it
not for the good hearts and kind I knew were under every roof. The
broad street crowded with people, did I say? A little lane rather; and
Elrigmore, with schooling and the wisdom of travel, felt he could see
into the heart's core of the cunningest merchant in the place.

But anyway, here I was, riding into town from the Cromalt end on a night
in autumn. It was after ten by my Paris watch when I got the length of
the Creags, and I knew that there was nothing but a sleeping town before
me, for our folks were always early bedders when the fishin