He had never in his life been a
mile away from his native parish, and Dick knew that as well as he did,
but it made no difference. 'They wore kilts, and father wore a kilt, and
had a feather in his bonnet, and top-boots like Robin Hood, all loose
about the tops, and a bow and arrow. And he smoked a cigar, and gave me
a whole lot of vesuvians to strike by myself behind a tent. You could
smell vesuvians and cigars and sunshiny trod-on grass everywhere.'

'Tell us about the Highlanders,' said Dick.

'They was all ten foot high,' said Paul. 'They wouldn't have 'em in the
eleven without they was ten foot high.'

Dick said that stood to reason.

'And they played in their kilts, and they didn't wear pads, and they
had their bats all made of iron, and the ball was iron, too. It was a
cannon-ball, and they fired it out of a cannon, and the wickets was a
mile and a half apart--no, a mile and a quarter--and one man hit the
ball, and the other men shouted, "Run it out!" and he ran sixty-four
runs. Then he dropped down stone-dead, and Mr. Murchison read the
funeral service.'

Then the talk drifted. Next Sunday the Rev. Roderic Murchison, M.A.,
read out from the pulpit a text which gave over all liars to fire and
brimstone. Paul went quaking all day. Dick and he slept together in a
gaunt attic chamber. Mary, their sister, twenty years Paul's elder, saw
them to bed, put them through a rough form of prayer, and took away the
candle. Dick, with nothing on his conscience, went to sleep. Paul lay
and sweated, dreading fire, and wondering with open-eyed horror, 'Why
brimstone?' and imagining extraordinary terrors from its addition.
At last conscience would have no Nay, and brimful of fear and
contrition--for the one was as real as the other--he woke up Dick in
the black hollow of the night This was hard work, but he was bent on
self-purgation, and would not confess until Dick was really wide awake.

'Dick!' he said, gripping his brother in the dark and straining him in
his childish arms. 'Dick! Oh, Dick, I've been a liar, and I daresn't
go to sleep. Do you remember what I said about the Highlanders last
Thursday?'

'Blow the Highlanders!' said Dick. 'What did ye wake _me_ up for?'

'It wasn't true, Dick,' the penitent whimpered. 'I never saw a
Highlander, and father didn't take me to Scotland with him. It was all
made up.'

'I know that,' said Dick. 'You _are_ a fool to wake a chap up in the
dark to tell him that.'

That was