me.]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. Juventus Mundi
II. The Last of the Games
III. Altered Circumstances
IV. Further Endeavour
V. The High Road

THE FOUR MACNICOLS.

CHAPTER I.

JUVENTUS MUNDI.

It was on a bright and glorious morning in July that the great
chieftain, Robert of the Red Hand, accompanied by his kinsmen and
allies, put to sea in his war-galley, resolved to sweep the Spanish
main free of all his enemies, and thereafter to hold high revel in the
halls of Eilean-na-Rona. At least, that was how it appeared to the
imagination of the great chieftain himself, though the simple facts of
the case were a trifle less romantic. For this Robert of the Red Hand,
more familiarly known as Rob MacNicol, or even as plain Rob, was an
active, stout-sinewed, black-eyed lad of seventeen, whose only mark of
chieftainship apparently was that, unlike his brothers, he wore shoes
and stockings; these three relatives constituted his allies and
kinsmen; the so-called Spanish main was in reality an arm of the sea
better known in the Hebrides as Loch Scrone; and the war-galley was an
old, ramshackle, battered, and betarred boat belonging generally to the
fishing-village of Erisaig; for, indeed, the boat was so old and so
battered that nobody now seemed to claim any special ownership of it.

These four MacNicols,--Robert, Neil, Nicol, and Duncan,--were, it must
be admitted, an idle and graceless set, living for the most part a
hand-to-mouth, amphibious, curlew-like kind of life, and far more given
to aimless voyages in boats not belonging to them than inclined to turn
their hand to any honest labour. But this must be said in their excuse
that no boy or lad born in the village of Erisaig could by any means
whatsoever be brought to think of becoming anything else than a
fisherman. It was impossible to induce them to apprentice themselves
to any ordinary trade. They would wait until they were old enough to
go after the herring, like the others; that was man's work; that was
something like; that was different from staying ashore and twiddling
one's fingers over a pair of somebody else's shoes, or laboriously
shaping a block of sandstone for somebody else's house. This Rob
MacNicol, for example: it was only for want of a greater career that he
had constituted himself a dreaded sea-rover, a stern chieftain, etc.
etc. His secret ambition--his great and constant and secret
ambition--went far farth