“We have so many poets between Knapdale and Cruachan,” said John, “that the business is fallen out of repute, and men brag when they can make an honest living at prose.” “Honest living,” said the bard, “would be the last thing I would expect Clan Campbell to brag of.” He was still in an annoyance at the set-back to his vanity, shuffling his feet restlessly on the ground, and ill at ease about the mouth, that I’ve noticed is the first feature to show a wound to the conceit. “Come, come,” he went on, “will you dare tell me that the sheiling singers on Loch Finneside have never heard my ‘Harp of the Trees’? If there’s a finer song of its kind in all Albainn I’ve yet to learn it.” “If I heard it,” said John, “I’ve forgotten it.” “Name of God!” cried the bard in amaze, “you couldn’t; it goes so”--and he hummed the tune that every one in Argile and the west had been singing some years before. We pretended to listen with eagerness to recall a single strain of it, and affected to find no familiar note. He tried others of his budget--some rare and beautiful songs, I must frankly own: some we knew by fragments; some we had sung in the wood of Creag Dubh--but to each and all John Splendid raised a vacant face and denied acquaintance. “No doubt,” said he, “they are esteemed in the glens of Keppoch, but Argile is fairly happy without them. Do you do anything else for a living but string rhymes?” The bard was in a sweat of vexation. “I’ve wandered far,” said he, “and you beat all I met in a multitude of people. Do you think the stringing of rhymes so easy that a man should be digging and toiling in the field and the wood between his _duans_?” “I think,” said Splendid (and it was the only time a note of earnestness was in his utterance)--“I think his songs would be all the better for some such manly interregnum. You sing of battles: have you felt the blood rush behind the eyes and the void of courageous alarm at the pit of the stomach? You hum of grief: have you known the horror of a desolate home? Love,--sir, you are young, young------” “Thanks be with you,” said the bard; “your last word gives me the clue to my answer to your first I have neither fought nor sorrowed in the actual fact; but I have loved, not a maid (perhaps), nor in errant freaks of the mind, but a something unnameable and remote, with a bounteous overflowing of the spirit. And that way I learned the splendour of war as I sat by the fire; and the widows of my fancy wring my heart with a sorrow as deep as the ruined homes your clan have made in my country could confer.” I’m afraid I but half comprehended his meaning, but the rapture of his eye infected me like a glisk of the sun. He was a plain, gawky, nervous man, very freckled at the hands, and as poor a leg in the kilt as well could be. He was fronting us with the unspoken superiority of the fowl on its own midden, but he had a most heart-some and invigorating glow.