He had been twenty years in the Navy, and had seen but a single engagement—the one that gave him his byname, and cost him his leg. He came home with a pension, and settled in his native parish. He was elderly; he was—as we should think it now—ill-educated; he was without wife or child of his own; he had at times the habit of ran-dan, as we call a convivial rollicking. Heaven plainly meant him for a Highland school, and so he opened one—this same, so lowly to-day among the nettles. Of the various things he taught, the most I can remember (besides reading, which came, I fear, more by nature than by Copenhagen’s teaching) was the geography of the Baltic, the graphic fact that Horatio Nelson nearly always wore a grey surtout, three ways of tying knots, and a song of epic character called “The Plains of Waterloo.” What would perhaps be called a “special subject” nowadays was the art he taught us of keeping birds from cherry-trees. The cherry-trees grew up the front of Copenhagen’s bachelor dwelling-house, half a mile from the school. When the fruit reddened, every scholar in the school (we numbered twelve or fourteen) rose at dawn for days and sat below the cherry-trees chanting a Gaelic incantation that never failed to keep away the predatory thrush. The odd thing was that Copenhagen, in spite of these precautions, never got a single cherry, and did not seem to care. We ate the cherries as they ripened, relieving each other alternately of the incantation; he came out to praise us for our industry, and never cast a glance aloft. The fees for Copenhagen’s college were uncertain—not only in payment, but in amount. When our parents asked him what was to pay for Bob or Sandy, the antique pensioner blew his nose with noisy demonstration, and invariably answered, “We don’t know what we’ll need till we see what we’ll require.” His requirements were manifestly few, for three-fourths of the pupils contributed nothing to the upkeep of the school but a diurnal peat in winter, and the others had their fees wholly expended on pens and paper for themselves when the flying stationer came round twice a year. We grew to like and to respect old Copenhagen, knowing nothing of his ran-dans, that were confined to the town six miles away, and never were allowed to interfere with his duty to his pupils. He made no brilliant scholars, but he gave us a thousand pleasant, droll, and kindly memories that go far as a substitute for a superficial knowledge of Greek. I would myself have learned the cutlass from him, being the oldest of the pupils and the likeliest to make a good practitioner of that noble marine weapon; but, unhappily, I left the school and started my career in town the very day he had unearthed the sword and brought it forth for my first lesson.