and everything seemed unspeakably dreary. We were quarrelling among ourselves and feeling altogether wretched, when the door opened and Father looked in on us. 'Alone, folkies?' he said. 'Where's your mother?' We told him you were out and that we had nothing to do, and that everything was beastly. He laughed and went away, and came back presently with a book. It was _The Queen's Wake_, and for the first time we heard of 'bonnie Kilmeny' who went away to Fairyland. We forgot the fog, we forgot our grievances; we were carried away with Kilmeny. Then Father got a ballad-book, and that was even better, for the clash of armies was ever music in our ears. We sprawled over him in our excitement as he read how 'in the gryming of a new-fa'en snaw' Jamie Telfer of the fair Dodhead carried the 'fraye' to Branksome ha'. Our tea was brought in, but the pile of bread-and-butter was hardly diminished, for Father read on, sometimes laughing aloud in his delight at what he read, sometimes stopping for a moment to drink some tea, but his eyes never leaving the printed page. How could we eat when we were hearing for the first time of Johnnie Armstrong going out to meet his King in all good faith, only to find that death was to be his portion? We howled like angry wolves when Father read: 'To seek het water beneath cauld ice, Surely it is a great folie-- I have asked grace at a graceless face, But there is nane for my men and me.' When you came in, we only looked at you vaguely, and said, 'Go on, Father, go on,' and he explained, These benighted children have never heard the _Border Ballad_', Nell,' and then you sat down and listened too.... D'you remember people in Glasgow, who owned big restaurants all over the place--Webster, I think, was the name, and there was a fat only son who sometimes came in to play with us? I don't know what Mr. Webster was like in his home life, but that fat boy said to me very feelingly, '_Yours is a jolly kind of father to have_.' It was generous of him, for only that morning he had taunted me with the fact that my father played a penny whistle, and I, deeply affronted, had replied with a tasteful reference to the restaurants, 'Well, anyway, he doesn't sell tuppenny pies like your father does.'" "Oh, that penny whistle!" said Mrs. Douglas, with a laugh and a sigh. "He made wonderful music on it. There was always something of the Pied Piper about your father. Down in the district the children used to come up and pull at his coat and look up in his face; they had no fear of him; and whenever he entered the hall on Band of Hope nights the place was in an uproar with yells for a story. He would get up on the little platform and, leaning over the table, he would tell them 'Jock and his Mother,' or 'The Bannock that went to see the World,' or 'Maya'--fine stories, but not a moral to one of them."