my father and I was
but a raw ensign."

"I'll warrant you were home-sick when you said it," said the General.

"Was I not?" cried the brother. "'Twas that urged me on. For one of my
company, just a minute before, had been singing Donacha Ban's song of
'Ben Dorain,' and no prospect in the world seemed so alluring to me then
as a swath of the land I came from."

"I know 'Ben Dorain,'" said Gilian timidly, "and I think I could tell
just the way you felt when you heard the man singing it in a foreign
place."

"Come away, then, my twelve-year-old warlock," said the Cornal,
mockingly, yet wondering too.

"This is a real oddity," said the General, drawing his chair a little
nearer the boy.

"I heard a forester sing 'Ben Dorain' last Hogmanay at home--I mean in
Ladyfield; he was not a good singer, and he forgot bits of the words
here and there, but when he was singing it I saw the sun rise on the
hill, not a slow grey, but suddenly in a smother of gold, and the
hillside moved with deer. Birds whirred from the heather and the cuckoo
was in the wood."

"That was very unlucky about the cuckoo before breakfast," said the
Cornal, and he quoted a Gaelic proverb.

"Oh! if I was in a foreign place and some one sang that song I would be
very, very sick for home. I would be full of thoughts about the lochs
and the hunting roads, the slope of the braes and stripes of black
fir on them; the crying of cattle, the sound of burn and _eas_ and the
voices of people I knew would be dragging my heart home. I would be
saying, 'Oh! you strangers, you do not understand. You have not the want
at your hearts,' and there would be one little bit of the place at home
as plain to my view as that picture."

As he spoke, Gilian pointed at "The Battle of Vittoria." The brothers
turned and looked as if it was something quite new and strange to them.
Up rose the Cornal and went closer to peer at it.

"Confound it!" said he. "You're there with your tale of a ballant, and
you point at the one picture ever I saw that gave me the day-dreaming. I
never see that smudgy old print but I'm crying on the cavalry that made
the Frenchmen rout."

From where he sat the boy could make out the picture in every detail. It
was a scene of flying and broken troops, of men on the wings of terror
and dragoons riding them down. There was at the very front of the
picture, in a corner, among the flying Frenchmen pursued by the horses,
the presentment of a Scottish sold