sing:
Sing, hope, to me!
Sweet notes, my hope, sweet notes for memory.

The sap will surely quicken soon or late,
The tardiest bird will twitter to a mate;
So Spring must dawn again with warmth and bloom,
Or in this world, or in the world to come:
Sing, voice of Spring!
Till I, too, blossom and rejoice and sing.

Christina Rossetti

Be that which you would make others.

Amiel

THE BATTLE OF THE PIPES

A thing happened worth narrating at the close of a visit paid me by
Robin Oig, one of the sons of the notorious Rob Roy. As he was leaving,
just in the door, he met Alan coming in; and the two drew back and
looked at each other like strange dogs. They were neither of them big
men, but they seemed fairly to swell out with pride. Each wore a sword,
and by a movement of his haunch, thrust clear the hilt of it, so that it
might be the more readily grasped and the blade drawn.

"Mr. Stewart, I am thinking," says Robin.

"Troth, Mr. Macgregor, it's not a name to be ashamed of," answered Alan.

"I did not know ye were in my country, sir," says Robin.

"It sticks in my mind that I am in the country of my friends, the
Maclarens," says Alan.

"That's a kittle point," returned the other. "There may be two words to
say to that. But I think I will have heard that you are a man of your
sword?"

"Unless ye were born deaf, Mr. Macgregor, ye will have heard a good
deal more than that," says Alan. "I am not the only man who can draw
steel in Appin; and when my kinsman and captain, Ardshiel, had a talk
with a gentleman of your name, not so many years back, I could never
hear that the Macgregor had the best of it."

"Do you mean my father, sir?" says Robin.

"Well, I wouldnae wonder," says Alan. "The gentleman I have in my mind
had the ill-taste to clap Campbell to his name."

"My father was an old man," returned Robin. "The match was unequal. You
and me would make a better pair, sir."

"I was thinking that," said Alan.

I was half out of bed, and Duncan had been hanging at the elbow of these
fighting cocks, ready to intervene upon the least occasion. But when
that word was uttered, it was a case of now or never; and Duncan, with
something of a white face to be sure, thrust himself between.

"Gentlemen," said he, "I will have been thinking of a very different
matter. Here are my pipes, and here are you two gentlemen who are baith
acclaimed pipers. It's an auld