od,"
he said at last.

"No, it would be well to have a Parliament back in Edinburgh," said my
father; "but I am kept so busy with the sheep that I have little enough
time to think of such things."

"It is for fine young men like you two to think of it," said de Lapp.
"When a country is injured, it is to its young men that it looks to
avenge it."

"Aye! the English take too much upon themselves sometimes," said Jim.

"Well, if there are many of that way of thinking about, why should we
not form them into battalions and march them upon London?" cried de
Lapp.

"That would be a rare little picnic," said I, laughing. "And who would
lead us?"

He jumped up, bowing, with his hand on his heart, in his queer fashion.

"If you will allow me to have the honour!" he cried; and then seeing
that we were all laughing, he began to laugh also, but I am sure that
there was really no thought of a joke in his mind.

I could never make out what his age could be, nor could Jim Horscroft
either. Sometimes we thought that he was an oldish man that looked
young, and at others that he was a youngish man who looked old. His
brown, stiff, close-cropped hair needed no cropping at the top, where it
thinned away to a shining curve. His skin too was intersected by a
thousand fine wrinkles, lacing and interlacing, and was all burned, as I
have already said, by the sun. Yet he was as lithe as a boy, and he was
as tough as whalebone, walking all day over the hills or rowing on the
sea without turning a hair. On the whole we thought that he might be
about forty or forty-five, though it was hard to see how he could have
seen so much of life in the time. But one day we got talking of ages,
and then he surprised us.

I had been saying that I was just twenty, and Jim said that he was
twenty-seven.

"Then I am the most old of the three," said de Lapp.

We laughed at this, for by our reckoning he might almost have been
our father.

"But not by so much," said he, arching his brows. "I was
nine-and-twenty in December."

And it was this even more than his talk which made us understand what an
extraordinary life it must have been that he had led. He saw our
astonishment, and laughed at it.

"I have lived! I have lived!" he cried. "I have spent my days and my
nights. I led a company in a battle where five nations were engaged
when I was but fourteen. I made a king turn pale at the words I
whispered in his ear when I was twenty.