orthy memory. My fancy, like that of most
boys, was all for the wars, and full of dreams concerning knights and
ladies, dragons and enchanters, about which the other lads were fain
enough to hear me tell what I had read in romances, though they mocked at
me for reading. Yet they oft came ill speed with their jests, for my
brother had taught me to use my hands: and to hold a sword I was
instructed by our smith, who had been prentice to Harry Gow, the Burn-the-
Wind of Perth, and the best man at his weapon in broad Scotland. From
him I got many a trick of fence that served my turn later.

But now the evil time came when my dear mother sickened and died, leaving
to me her memory and her great chain of gold. A bitter sorrow is her
death to me still; but anon my father took to him another wife of the
Bethunes of Blebo. I blame myself, rather than this lady, that we dwelt
not happily in the same house. My father therefore, still minded to make
me a churchman, sent me to Robert of Montrose's new college that stands
in the South Street of St. Andrews, a city not far from our house of
Pitcullo. But there, like a wayward boy, I took more pleasure in the
battles of the "nations"--as of Fife against Galloway and the Lennox; or
in games of catch-pull, football, wrestling, hurling the bar, archery,
and golf--than in divine learning--as of logic, and Aristotle his
analytics.

Yet I loved to be in the scriptorium of the Abbey, and to see the good
Father Peter limning the blessed saints in blue, and red, and gold, of
which art he taught me a little. Often I would help him to grind his
colours, and he instructed me in the laying of them on paper or vellum,
with white of egg, and in fixing and burnishing the gold, and in drawing
flowers, and figures, and strange beasts and devils, such as we see
grinning from the walls of the cathedral. In the French language, too,
he learned me, for he had been taught at the great University of Paris;
and in Avignon had seen the Pope himself, Benedict XIII., of uncertain
memory.

Much I loved to be with Father Peter, whose lessons did not irk me, but
jumped with my own desire to read romances in the French tongue, whereof
there are many. But never could I have dreamed that, in days to come,
this art of painting would win me my bread for a while, and that a Leslie
of Pitcullo should be driven by hunger to so base and contemned a
handiwork, unworthy, when practised for gain, of my blood.

Yet