re?" And the tune fell low and witching, bringing
tears to the eyes and joy to the heart; and the man knew (though no one
told him) that this was the first part of the Rime, the Song of the
Open Road, the Lilt of the Adventurer, which shall be now and ever and
to the end of days.

Then the melody changed to a fiercer and sadder note. He saw his
forefathers, gaunt men and terrible, run stark among woody hills. He
heard the talk of the bronze-clad invader, and the jar and clangour as
stone met steel. Then rose the last coronach of his own people, hiding
in wild glens, starving in corries, or going hopelessly to the death.
He heard the cry of the Border foray, the shouts of the famished Scots
as they harried Cumberland, and he himself rode in the midst of them.
Then the tune fell more mournful and slow, and Flodden lay before him.
He saw the flower of the Scots gentry around their King, gashed to the
breast-bone, still fronting the lines of the south, though the paleness
of death sat on each forehead. "The flowers of the Forest are gone,"
cried the lilt, and through the long years he heard the cry of the
lost, the desperate, fighting for kings over the water and princes in
the heather. "Who cares?" cried the air. "Man must die, and how can
he die better than in the stress of fight with his heart high and alien
blood on his sword? Heigh-ho! One against twenty, a child against a
host, this is the romance of life." And the man's heart swelled, for
he knew (though no one told him) that this was the Song of Lost Battles
which only the great can sing before they die.

But the tune was changing, and at the change the man shivered for the
air ran up to the high notes and then down to the deeps with an eldrich
cry, like a hawk's scream at night, or a witch's song in the gloaming.
It told of those who seek and never find, the quest that knows no
fulfilment. "There is a road," it cried, "which leads to the Moon and
the Great Waters. No changehouse cheers it, and it has no end; but it
is a fine road, a braw road--who will follow it?" And the man knew
(though no one told him) that this was the Ballad of Grey Weather,
which makes him who hears it sick all the days of his life for
something which he cannot name. It is the song which the birds sing on
the moor in the autumn nights, and the old crow on the treetop hears
and flaps his wing. It is the lilt which men and women hear in the
darkening of their days, and sigh for t