The Lost Pibroch, and other Sheiling Stories. Munro Neil

one must have the truth, the piping is bad piping, but the fish-lures and the tales are the best in the world. You will find some of the tales in the writings of Iain Og of Isla – such as “The Brown Bear of the Green Glen”; but the best are to hear as Boboon minds them when he sits with you on the roadside or on the heather beside the evening fire, when the brown fluffy eagles bark at the mist on Braevallach. Listen well to them, for this person has the gift. He had it from his father, who had it from his father, who had it from a mother, who, in deep trouble and disease, lay awake through long nights gathering thoughts as healthy folks gather nuts – a sweet thing enough from a sour husk.

      And if time were your property (as it should be the portion of every wiselike man), you might hear many tales from Old Boboon, but never the tale of his own three chances.

      It happened once upon a time that the captain in the town took a notion to make Boboon into a tame house-man instead of a creature of the woods and highways. He took him first by himself and clapped him into a kilt of his own tartan eight yards round the buttocks, full pleated, with hose of fine worsted, and a coat with silver buttons. He put a pickle money in his sporran, and gave him a place a little way down his table. The feeding was high and the work was to a wanderer’s fancy; for it was but whistling to a dog now and then, chanting a stave, or telling a story, or roaming through the garden behind the house.

      “Ho, ho!” said Boboon, “am not I the sturdy fellow come to his own?” and about the place he would go with a piper’s swagger, switching the grass and shrubs with a withie as he went, in the way gentlemen use riding-sticks.

      But when Inneraora town lay in the dark of the winter night, and the captain’s household slept, Boboon would hear his clan calling on him outside the wall.

      “Boboon! oh, Boboon! old hero! come and collogue with your children.”

      He would go to the wall, which was lower on the inside than the out (and is, indeed, the wall of old Quinten, where a corps of Campbells, slaughtered by Inverlochy dogs, lie under a Latin stone), and he would look down at his friends running about like pole-cats in the darkness, in their ragged kilts and trews, their stringy hair tossing in the wind. The women themselves would be there, with the bairns whining on their backs.

      “Ay! ay! this is you, my hearty folk!” he would say; “glad am I to see you and smell the wood-fire reek off you. How is it on the road?”

      “From here we have not moved since you left us, John Fine. We are camped in the Blue Quarry, and you never came near your children and friends.”

      “God! and here’s the one that’s sorry for that same. But over the walls they will not let me. ‘If gentleman you would be,’ says the captain, ‘you must keep out of woods and off the highway.’”