John Splendid looked at me from the corner of an eye as we came out again and daundered slowly down the town. “A queer one yon!” said he, as it were feeling his way with a rapier-point at my mind about his Marquis. “Do you tell me?” I muttered, giving him parry of low quarte like a good swordsman, and he came to the recover with a laugh. “Foil, Elrigmore!” he cried. “But we’re soldiers and lads of the world, and you need hardly be so canny. You see MacCailein’s points as well as I do. His one weakness is the old one--books, books,--the curse of the Highlands and every man of spirit, say I. He has the stuff in him by nature, for none can deny Clan Diarmaid courage and knightliness; but for four generations court, closet, and college have been taking the heart out of our chiefs. Had our lordship in-bye been sent a fostering in the old style, brought up to the chase and the sword and manly comportment, he would not have that wan cheek this day, and that swithering about what he must be at next!” “You forget that I have had the same ill-training,” I said (in no bad humour, for I followed his mind). “I had a touch of Glascow College myself.” “Yes, yes,” he answered quickly; “you had that, but by all accounts it did you no harm. You learned little of what they teach there.” This annoyed me, I confess, and John Splendid was gleg enough to see it “I mean,” he added, “you caught no fever for paper and ink, though you may have learned many a quirk I was the better of myself. I could never even write my name; and I’ve kept compt of wages at the mines with a pickle chuckie-stones.” “That’s a pity,” says I, drily. “Oh, never a bit,” says he, gaily, or at any rate with a way as if to carry it off vauntingly. “I can do many things as well as most, and a few others colleges never learned me. I know many winter tales, from ‘Minochag and Morag’ to ‘The Shifty Lad’; I can make passable poetry by word of mouth; I can speak the English and the French, and I have seen enough of courtiers to know that half their canons are to please and witch the eye of women in a way that I could undertake to do by my looks alone and some good-humour. Show me a beast on hill or in glen I have not the history of; and if dancing, singing, the sword, the gun, the pipes--ah, not the pipes,--it’s my one envy in the world to play the bagpipes with some show of art and delicacy, and I cannot. Queer is that, indeed, and I so keen on them! I would tramp right gaily a night and a day on end to hear a scholar fingering ‘The Glen is Mine.’” There was a witless vanity about my friend that sat on him almost like a virtue. He made parade of his crafts less, I could see, because he thought much of them, than because he wanted to keep himself on an equality with me. In the same way, as I hinted before, he never, in all the time of our wanderings after, did a thing well before me but he bode to keep up my self-respect by maintaining that I could do better, or at least as good.