at from this small eminence, where the
garden did not display its dishevelment and even the bedraggled bower
seen from the rear had a look of trim' composure.

To add to the morning's cheerfulness Mungo was afoot whistling a ballad
air of the low country, with a regard for neither time nor tune in his
puckered lips as he sat on a firkin-head at an outhouse door and gutted
some fish he had caught with his own hands in a trammel net at the
river-mouth before Montaiglon was awake and the bird, as the Gaelic
goes, had drunk the water.

"Gude mornin' to your honour," he cried with an elaborately flourished
salute as Montaiglon sauntered up to him. "Ye're early on the move,
Monsher; a fine caller mornin'. I hope ye sleepit weel; it was a gowsty
nicht."

In spite of his assumed indifference and the purely casual nature of
his comment upon the night, there was a good deal of cunning, thought
Montaiglon, in the beady eyes of him, but the stranger only smiled at
the ease of those Scots domestic manners.

"I did very well, I thank you," said he. "My riding and all the rest
of it yesterday would have made me sleep soundly inside the drum of a
marching regiment."

"That's richt, that's richt," said Mungo, ostentatiously handling
the fish with the awkward repugnance of one unaccustomed to a task so
menial, to prove perhaps that cleansing them was none of his accustomed
office. "That's richt. When we were campaignin' wi' Marlborough oor lads
had many a time to sleep wi' the cannon dirlin' aboot them. Ye get us'd
to't, ye get us'd to't, as Annapla says aboot bein' a weedow woman.
And if ye hae noticed it, Coont, there's nae people mair adapted for
fechtin' under diffeeculties than oor ain; that's what maks the Scots
the finest sogers in the warld. It's the build o' them, 'Lowlan' or
'Hielan', the breed o' them; the dour hard character o' their country
and their mainner o' leevin'. We gied the English a fleg at the
'Forty-five,' didnae we? That was where the tartan cam' in: man, there's
naethin' like us!"

"You do not speak like a Highlander," said Montaiglon, finding some of
this gasconade unintelligible.

"No, I'm no' exactly a'thegether a Hielan'man," Mungo admitted, "though
I hae freends con-nekit wi' the auldest clans, and though I'm, in a
mainner o' speakin', i' the tail o' Doom, as I was i' the tail o' his
faither afore him--peace wi' him, he was the grand soger!--but Hielan'
or Lowland, we gied them their scuds at the '