sest kith of the King are aye most kindly, because the habit is
born in them to be freehanded and unafraid. Am not I the _oinseach_ to
be sticking up for pedigrees? Perhaps it is because our own is so good.
Kiels was ours three hundred years, and my grandfather was good-brother
to an earl--a not very good nor honest lord they say--and the Turners
were only portioners and tenants as far back as we ken."

"I liked the look of the one with his hair in a tail," said Gilian, and
he wondered if she was angry at his admiration of the enemy, when he saw
her face grow red.

--"Oh! the General!" she exclaimed, but never a word more, good or ill.

CHAPTER VII--THE MAN ON THE QUAY

It has always happened that the first steps of a boy from the glen have
been to the quay. There the ships lie clumsily on their bulging sides in
the ebb till the tar steams and blisters in the sun, or at the full they
lift and fall heavily like a sigh for the ocean's expanse as they feel
themselves prisoners to the rings and pawls. Their chains jerk and ease
upon the granite edges of the wall or twang tight across the quay so
that the mariners and fishermen moving about their business on this
stone-thrust to the sea must lift their clumping boots high to step
across those tethers of romance. At a full tide one walking down the
quay has beside him the dark aspiring bulwarks of the little but brave
adventurers, their seams gazing to the heat, their carvel timbers
striped by the ooze and brine of many oceans and the scum of ports. Upon
their poops their den-fire chimneys breathe a faint blue reek; the
iron of bilge-pump and pin is rust red; the companions are portals to
smelling depths where the bunks are in a perpetual gloom and the seamen
lie at night or in the heat of the day discontent with this period of
no roaming and remembering the tumbling waters and the far-off harbours
that must ever be more alluring than the harbours where we be. From the
ivy of the church the little birds come chaffering and twittering
among the shrouds, and the pigeon will perch upon a spar, so that the
sea-gull, the far-searcher, must wonder as he passes on a slant
of silent leathers at its daring thus to utilise the device of the
outermost seas and the most vehement storms. And side by side with
these, the adventurers, are the skiffs and smacks of the fishermen,
drilled in rows, brought bow up, taut on their anchors with their
lug-sails down on their masts to make d