Now, nearly everyone on the Island of Oig bore the name of Gilderoy; and this was all the more noteworthy because Gilderoy was not their real name, but one which the whole clan to which the islanders belonged had taken to hide their own, in order to escape the enmity of other and more powerful clans on the mainland, which had sworn to wipe them out. This wholesale exchange had taken place more than three hundred years before, and only a few of the very old islanders, living in the most out-of-the-way corners of the isle, any longer remembered what their real name was; and they were not believed by the rest, because the story sounded so strange beside the sober narratives of events told in the books written by people in Edinburgh, and called the “History of Scotland.” Therefore, though the _Pax Britannica_ was now established in Oig, the inhabitants still clung to their cloak-name, so that all of them but those whose families had come into the island since the sixteenth century called themselves Gilderoy. And of these Gilderoys every third man had been baptized Duncan, because Duncan was the lucky name of the island, and it was well known that if you were baptized by that name you could not be drowned, unless the nixies made a mistake;--though even that was not known to the present generation, who had been brought up on the Edinburgh books, and who therefore thought they had their children baptized Duncan because it was the custom. So when the outlander put his question the boys stood dumb at first, staring at him and wondering at his stupidity. The invader on his part wondered at theirs. “Don’t you speak English?” he demanded crossly, as though ignorance of that tongue were wrong in itself, a sign of natural depravity which even the benighted heathen must know in their hearts they ought to be ashamed of. The boys seemed to feel the force of the rebuke. They turned their eyes to one who stood in the forefront of the little group, as if calling on him to defend them. The leader answered instantly: “What Duncan Gilderoy is that?” He spoke the outlander’s tongue as easily as the outlander himself, though each of them sounded his words in a way that seemed a little strange in the other’s ears. The man from the mainland crowded his words in that habit of hurried speech which towns beget. The boy intoned his words with a slight shrillness caught from the winds and waves that battle round the Hebrides. The boy had already learnt from the stranger’s speech that he was an Englishman; the Englishman thought he learnt from the boy’s that he was not a Scotchman. To the Englishman a Scotchman was a person who spoke the dialect of old Northumbria. He had expected to find the islanders of Oig speaking either Gaelic or the speech of Burns. “Are you English?” he exclaimed. The boy flushed darkly. “No,” he said, and held his tongue.