"Thanks be with you," said the bard; "your last word gives me the clue to my answer to your first I have neither fought nor sorrowed in the actual fact; but I have loved, not a maid (perhaps), nor in errant freaks of the mind, but a something unnameable and remote, with a bounteous overflowing of the spirit. And that way I learned the splendour of war as I sat by the fire; and the widows of my fancy wring my heart with a sorrow as deep as the ruined homes your clan have made in my country could confer."
I'm afraid I but half comprehended his meaning, but the rapture of his eye infected me like a glisk of the sun. He was a plain, gawky, nervous man, very freckled at the hands, and as poor a leg in the kilt as well could be. He was fronting us with the unspoken superiority of the fowl on its own midden, but he had a most heart-some and invigorating glow.
"John Lorn, John Lom!" I cried, "I heard a soldier sing your songs in the ship Archangel of Leith that took us to Elsinore."
He turned with a grateful eye from M'Iver to me, and I felt that I had one friend now in Badenoch.
"Do you tell me?" he asked, a very child in his pleasure, that John Splendid told me after he had not the heart to mar. "Which one did they sing--'The Harp of the Trees' or 'Macrannul Og's Lament'? I am sure it would be the Lament: it is touched with the sorrow of the starless night on a rain-drummed, wailing sea. Or perhaps they knew--the gentle hearts--my 'Farewell to the Fisher.' I made it with yon tremor of joy, and it is telling of the far isles beyond Uist and Barra, and the Seven Hunters, and the white sands of Colomkill."
M'Iver sat down on the wayside and whittled a stick with a pretence at patience I knew he could scarcely feel, for we were fools to be dallying thus on the way in broad morning when we should be harking back to our friends as secretly as the fox.
"Were you on the ocean?" he asked the bard, whose rapture was not abated.
"Never," said he, "but I know Linnhe and Loch Eil and the fringe of Morar."
"Mere dubs," said M'Iver, pleasantly--"mere dubs or ditches. Now I, Barbreck, have been upon the deeps, tossed for days at hazard without a headland to the view. I may have made verse on the experience,--I'll not say yea or nay to that,--but I never gave a lochan credit for washing the bulged sides of the world."