red your Gaidhlig as you've remembered your Greek!"

"It's a long time since you've had a story of me, twelve long years,
and it's a long time before you'll have another, and I going away
tomorrow. Old Sergeant Death has his warrant out for me this many a
day, and it's only the wisdom of an old dog fox that eludes him; but
he'll lay me by the heels one of these days...then there'll be an end
to the grand stories... So after this, if you're wanting a story, you
must be writing it yourself...

"But before I die, I'll leave you the story of Marco Polo. There's
been a power of books written about Marco Polo. The scholars have
pushed up their spectacles and brushed the cobwebs from their ears, and
they've said, 'There's all there is about Marco Polo.'

"But the scholars are a queer and blind people, Brian Oge. I've heard
tell there's a doctor in Spain can weigh the earth. But he can't plow
a furrow that is needful, for planting corn. The scholars can tell how
many are the feathers in a bird's wing, but it takes me to inform the
doctors why the call comes to them, and they fly over oceans without
compass or sextant or sight of land.

"Did you ever see a scholar standing in front of a slip of a girl? In
all his learning he can find nothing to say to her. And every penny
poet in the country knows.

"Let you be listening now, Brian Oge, and let also the scholars be
listening. But whether the scholars do or not, I'm not caring. A pope
once listened to me with great respect, and a marshal of France and
poets without number. But the scholars do be turning up their noses.
And, mind you, I've got as much scholarship as the next man, as you'll
see from my story.

"Barring myself, is there no one in this house that takes snuff? No!
Ah, well, times do be changing."

CHAPTER I

Now it's nearing night on the first day of spring, and you could see
how loath day was to be going for even the short time until the rising
of the sun again. And though there was a chill on the canals, yet
there was great color to the sunset, the red of it on the water ebbing
into orange, and then to purple, and losing itself in the olive pools
near the mooring-ties. And a little wind came up from the Greek
islands, and now surged and fluttered, the way you'd think a harper
might be playing. You'd hear no sound, but the melody was there. It
was the rhythm of spring, that the old people recognize.

But the young people would know it was