nd Scarlett
Macdonald, and she will give you some dry clothes; and you will tell her
to send Duncan down to Borvabost, and bring up John the Piper and
Alister-nan-Each, and the lads of the _Nighean dubh_, if they are not
gone home to Habost yet. But it iss John the Piper must come directly."

The girl went away to seek counsel of Scarlett Macdonald, Duncan's wife,
and Mr. Mackenzie proceeded to walk up and down the big and half-lit
chamber. Then he went to a cupboard, and put out on the table a number
of tumblers and glasses, with two or three odd-looking bottles of
Norwegian make, consisting of four semicircular tubes of glass meeting
at top and bottom, leaving the centre of the vessel thus formed open. He
stirred up the blazing peats in the fireplace. He brought down from a
shelf a box filled with coarse tobacco, and put it on the table. But he
was evidently growing impatient, and at last he put on his cap again and
went out into the night.

The air blew cold in from the sea, and whistled through the bushes that
Sheila had trained about the porch. There was no rain now, but a great
and heavy darkness brooded overhead, and in the silence he could hear
the breaking of the waves along the hard coast. But what was this other
sound he heard, wild and strange in the stillness of the night--a shrill
and plaintive cry that the distance softened until it almost seemed to
be the calling of a human voice? Surely those were words that he heard,
or was it only that the old, sad air spoke to him?--

For Lochaber no more, Lochaber no more,
Maybe to return to Lochaber no more.

That was the message that came to him out of the darkness, and it seemed
to him as if the sea and the night and the sky were wailing over the
loss of his Sheila. He walked away from the house and up the hill
behind. Led by the sound of the pipes, that grew louder and more
unearthly as he approached, he found himself at length on a bit of high
table-land overlooking the sea, where Sheila had had a rude bench of
iron and wood fixed into the rock. On this bench sat a little old man,
humpbacked and bent, and with long white hair falling down to his
shoulders. He was playing the pipes--not wildly and fiercely, as if he
were at a drinking-bout of the lads come home from the Caithness
fishing, nor yet gayly and proudly, as if he were marching at the head
of a bridal-procession, but slowly, mournfully, monotonously, as though
he were having the pipes talk