aybe no," he said. "I had half a mind to push on to
the big toun or even to the abroad. A man must try his fortune."

"That's the way of men," said the old wife. "I, too, have heard the
Rime, and many women who now sit decently spinning in Kilmaclavers have
heard it. But woman may hear it and lay it up in her soul and bide at
hame, while a man, if he get but a glisk of it in his fool's heart,
must needs up and awa' to the warld's end on some daft-like ploy. But
gang your ways and fare-ye-weel. My cousin Francie heard it, and he
went north wi' a white cockade in his bonnet and a sword at his side,
singing 'Charlie's come hame'. And Tam Crichtoun o' the Bourhopehead
got a sough o' it one simmers' morning, and the last we heard o' Tam he
was fechting like a deil among the Frenchmen. Once I heard a tinkler
play a sprig of it on the pipes, and a' the lads were wud to follow
him. Gang your ways for I am near the end o' mine."

And the old wife shook with her coughing. So the man put up his
belongings in a pack on his back and went whistling down the Great
South Road.

Whether or not this tale have a moral it is not for me to say. The
King (who told it me) said that it had, and quoted a scrap of Latin,
for he had been at Oxford in his youth before he fell heir to his
kingdom. One may hear tunes from the Rime, said he, in the thick of a
storm on the scarp of a rough hill, in the soft June weather, or in the
sunset silence of a winter's night. But let none, he added, pray to
have the full music; for it will make him who hears it a footsore
traveller in the ways o' the world and a masterless man till death.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Moon Endureth--Tales and Fancies, by
John Buchan

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