aying, the rather mean appeal of the slayer for protection
to the dead man's brother and the honourable fashion in which the
living Cameron elects to stand by his oath to the stranger in spite of
the three times repeated complaint and curse of his dead brother. The
spectre tells him that he will die at a place called Ticonderoga, but
such a word is known to no man, and yet, when Pitt sends a Highland
regiment, in which Captain Cameron is an officer, to the East, the
doomed man sees his own wraith look at him from the water, and knows,
when he hears the place is Ticonderoga, he will be the first to fall in
battle there.

The _Heather Ale_ is a Galloway legend which tells how the last Pict on
the Galloway moors prefers to see his son drowned and to die himself
rather than sell his honour and betray his secret to the King.

_Christmas at Sea_ is a sad little tale of how, when all men are glad on
board the labouring ship--that stormy Christmas Day--that she has at
last cleared the dangerous headland and is safely out at sea, the lad
who has left the old folk to run away to be a sailor can only see the
lighted home behind the coastguard's house,

'The pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair ...
... And oh the wicked fool I seemed in every kind of way
To be here hauling frozen ropes on Blessed Christmas Day ...
... They heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea.
But all that I could think of in the darkness and the cold
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.'

_Underwoods_ was published by the same firm in 1887, and is most
touchingly dedicated to all the many doctors of whose skill and kindness
Mr Stevenson had had such frequent need. The verses in it were written
at different times and in different places, and while many of them are
full of the early freshness of youth some of them give as pleasantly and
quaintly the riper wisdom of manhood.

Several of the verses are written to friends or relatives, some very
charming lines are to his father.

Eight lines called 'The Requiem' seem the very perfection of his own
idea of a last resting-place, and are almost prophetic of that lone
hill-top where he lies.

Book II. of _Underwoods_ is 'In Scots,' very forcible and graphic Scots
too, but as to the dialect Mr Stevenson himself disarms