“I heard a forester sing ‘Ben Dorain’ last Hogmanay at home--I mean in Ladyfield; he was not a good singer, and he forgot bits of the words here and there, but when he was singing it I saw the sun rise on the hill, not a slow grey, but suddenly in a smother of gold, and the hillside moved with deer. Birds whirred from the heather and the cuckoo was in the wood.” “That was very unlucky about the cuckoo before breakfast,” said the Cornal, and he quoted a Gaelic proverb. “Oh! if I was in a foreign place and some one sang that song I would be very, very sick for home. I would be full of thoughts about the lochs and the hunting roads, the slope of the braes and stripes of black fir on them; the crying of cattle, the sound of burn and _eas_ and the voices of people I knew would be dragging my heart home. I would be saying, ‘Oh! you strangers, you do not understand. You have not the want at your hearts,’ and there would be one little bit of the place at home as plain to my view as that picture.” As he spoke, Gilian pointed at “The Battle of Vittoria.” The brothers turned and looked as if it was something quite new and strange to them. Up rose the Cornal and went closer to peer at it. “Confound it!” said he. “You’re there with your tale of a ballant, and you point at the one picture ever I saw that gave me the day-dreaming. I never see that smudgy old print but I’m crying on the cavalry that made the Frenchmen rout.” From where he sat the boy could make out the picture in every detail. It was a scene of flying and broken troops, of men on the wings of terror and dragoons riding them down. There was at the very front of the picture, in a corner, among the flying Frenchmen pursued by the horses, the presentment of a Scottish soldier, wounded, lying upon his back with his elbows propped beneath him so that he had his head up, looking at the action, a soldier of a thin long habit of body, a hollow face and high cheekbones. Gilian forgot the two old men in the room with him when he looked intently on this soldier in the throes; he stood up from the chair, went forward and put a finger as high as he could to point out the particular thing he referred to. “That’s a man,” said he, “and he’s afraid. He does not hear the guns, nor the people crying, but he hears the horses’ feet thudding on the grass, and he thinks they will go over him and crush his bones.” “Curse me,” cried the Cornal, “but you have the thing to a nicety. That’s the man’s notion, for a guinea, for I have been in his case myself, and the thud of horses was a sound that filled the world. Sit down, sit down!” he went on sharply, as if he had of a sudden found something to reproach himself with in any complacent recognition of this child’s images. “You are not canny; how old are you?” Gilian was trembling and parched at the lips now, awake to the enormity of his forwardness. “I am twelve,” he repeated. “It is a cursed lie,” said the Cornal hotly; “you’re a hundred; don’t tell me!”