tled in
his ear, but he could get no comfort for this intolerable piping. At
last his patience failed him and he swore unchristian words. "Deil rax
the birds' thrapples," he cried. At this all the noise was hushed and
in a twinkling the moor was empty. Only one bird was left, standing on
tall legs before him with its head bowed upon its breast, and its beak
touching the heather.

Then the man repented his words and stared at the thing in the moss.
"What bird are ye?" he asked thrawnly.

"I am a Respectable Whaup," said the bird, "and I kenna why ye have
broken in on our family gathering. Once in a hundred years we
foregather for decent conversation, and here we are interrupted by a
muckle, sweerin' man."

Now the shepherd was a fellow of great sagacity, yet he never thought
it a queer thing that he should be having talk in the mid-moss with a
bird.

"What for were ye making siccan a din, then?" he asked. "D'ye no ken
ye were disturbing the afternoon of the holy Sabbath?"

The bird lifted its eyes and regarded him solemnly. "The Sabbath is a
day of rest and gladness," it said, "and is it no reasonable that we
should enjoy the like?"

The shepherd shook his head, for the presumption staggered him. "Ye
little ken what ye speak of," he said. "The Sabbath is for them that
have the chance of salvation, and it has been decreed that salvation is
for Adam's race and no for the beasts that perish."

The whaup gave a whistle of scorn. "I have heard all that long ago.
In my great grandmother's time, which 'ill be a thousand years and mair
syne, there came a people from the south with bright brass things on
their heads and breasts and terrible swords at their thighs. And with
them were some lang gowned men who kenned the stars and would come out
o' nights to talk to the deer and the corbies in their ain tongue. And
one, I mind, foregathered with my great-grandmother and told her that
the souls o' men flitted in the end to braw meadows where the gods bide
or gaed down to the black pit which they ca' Hell. But the souls o'
birds, he said, die wi' their bodies, and that's the end o' them.
Likewise in my mother's time, when there was a great abbey down yonder
by the Threepdaidle Burn which they called the House of Kilmaclavers,
the auld monks would walk out in the evening to pick herbs for their
distillings, and some were wise and kenned the ways of bird and beast.
They would crack often o' nights with my ain famil