"Then the Highlanders are as clannish as ever," cried the General. "Scotland has changed so much in the last half century that the Highlanders might have become quite unsentimental and matter-of-fact.
"Lowland civilisation only crossed the Highland line after '45, and it will take more than a hundred and thirty years to recast a Celt. Scottish education and theology are only a veneer on him, and below he has all his old instincts.
"So far as I can make out, a Celt will rather fish than plough, and be a gamekeeper than a workman; but if he be free to follow his own way, a genuine Highlander would rather be a soldier than anything else under the sun."
"What better could a man be?" and Kate's eyes sparkled; "they must envy the old times when their fathers raided the Lowlands and came home with the booty. It's a pity everybody is so respectable now, don't you think?"
"Certainly the police are very meddlesome," and Carmichael now devoted himself to Kate, without pretence of including the General; "but the spirit is not dead. A Celt is the child of generations of cattle-stealers, and the raiding spirit is still in the blood. May I offer an anecdote?"
"Six, if you have got so many, and they are all about Highlanders," and Kate leant forward and nursed her knee, for they had gone into the library.
"Last week I was passing the cattle market in Edinburgh, and a big Highland drover stopped me, begging for a little money.
"'It iss from Lochaber I hef come with some beasties, and to-morrow I will be walking back all the way, and it iss this night I hef no bed. I wass considering that the gardens would be a good place for a night, but they are telling me that the police will be disturbing me.'
"He looked so simple and honest that I gave him half-a-crown and said that I was half a Highlander. I have three Gaelic sentences, and I reeled them off with my best accent.
"'Got forgive me,' he said, 'for thinking you to be a Sassenach body, and taking your money from you. You are a fery well-made man, and here iss your silver piece, and may you always hef one in your pocket.'"
[Illustration: "Here is your silver piece."]
"'Tuts, tuts, that will be all right, for I hef maybe got some six or five notes of my own that were profit on the beasties; but it iss a pity not to be taking anything that iss handy when a body happens to be in the south.'"