logging, sparing him no details of the brutality. Sometimes his uncle
sat an hour with him and talked of the fight that was coming. He seemed
neither impatient nor excited. He looked forward with calm satisfaction
to the day when he would have a gun in his hand and an opportunity of
shooting at the men who were harrying the country.

"We have a couple of brass cannons, Neal. They're not much to boast of,
but if they are properly served they will do some mischief. I have a
little experience of artillery, though it wasn't in my regular line of
fighting. I think I'll perhaps get charge of one of them."

Felix Matier came often to see Neal. As things grew darker outside
he became more and more extravagantly cheerful. His talk was all of
liberty, of the dawn of the new era, of the breaking of old chains, and
the rising of the peoples of the world in unconquerable might.

"We're to do our share in the grand work, Neal Ward, you and me; we'll
have our hands in it in a day or two now.

"'May liberty meet with success!
May prudence protect her from evil!
May tyrants and tyranny tine in the midst
And wander their way to the devil.'

"Ora, but fighting's the work for a man after all. Here am I that have
spent my life making up reckonings and seeing to drink and men's dinners
and the beds they were to sleep in. But I never was contented with such
things, and the money I made didn't content me a bit more. _They_ taught
me better, boy." He put his hand on the pile of books which lay on the
table in front of Neal. "They taught me that there was something better
than making money and eating full and living soft, something in the
world a man might fight for. Eh, but I wasn't meant for an innkeeper--I
was meant for a fighter.

"'I'd fight at land, I'd fight at sea;
At hame I'd fight my auntie, O!
I'd meet the devil and Dundee
On the braes o' Killiecrankie, O!'"

James Hope also came to see Neal. His talk was very different from the
flamboyant exultation of Felix Matier; very different also from Donald
Ward's cool delight in the prospect of battle. James Hope seemed
to realise the awful gravity of taking up arms against established
government. He alone understood the very small chance there was of
victory for the United Irishmen. Yet Neal never for an instant doubted
Hope's courage. He felt that this man had argued out the whole matter
with himself and thought deeply and