That night he slept but little, and as the day went on grew more and more excited. Scarcely had he swallowed his twelve o’clock dinner of _sowens_ and oat-cake, when he wanted to go and dress himself for his approaching visit. Malcolm persuaded him however to lie down a while and hear him play, and succeeded, strange as it may seem with such an instrument, in lulling him to sleep. But he had not slept more than five minutes when he sprung from the bed, wide awake, crying--“My poy, Malcolm! my son! you haf let her sleep in; and ta creat peoples will be impatient for her music, and cursing her in teir hearts!” Nothing would quiet him but the immediate commencement of the process of dressing, the result of which was, as I have said, even pathetic, from its intermixture of shabbiness and finery. The dangling brass-capped tails of his sporran in front, the silver-mounted dirk on one side, with its hilt of black oak carved into an eagle’s head, and the steel basket of his broadsword gleaming at the other; his great shoulder-brooch of rudely chased brass; the pipes with their withered bag and gaudy streamers; the faded kilt, oiled and soiled; the stockings darned in twenty places by the hands of the termagant Meg Partan; the brogues patched and patched until it would have been hard to tell a spot of the original leather; the round blue bonnet grown gray with wind and weather: the belts that looked like old harness ready to yield at a pull; his skene dhu sticking out grim and black beside a knee like a lean knuckle:--all combined to form a picture ludicrous to a vulgar nature, but gently pitiful to the lover of his kind. He looked like a half-mouldered warrior, waked from beneath an ancient cairn, to walk about in a world other than he took it to be. Malcolm, in his common-place Sunday suit, served as a foil to his picturesque grandfather; to whose oft reiterated desire that he would wear the highland dress, he had hitherto returned no other answer than a humorous representation of the different remarks with which the neighbours would encounter such a solecism. The whole Seaton turned out to see them start. Men, women, and children lined the fronts and gables of the houses they must pass on their way; for everybody knew where they were going, and wished them good luck. As if he had been a great bard with a henchman of his own, Duncan strode along in front, and Malcolm followed, carrying the pipes, and regarding his grandfather with a mingled pride and compassion lovely to see. But as soon as they were beyond the village, the old man took the young one’s arm, not to guide him, for that was needless, but to stay his steps a little, for when dressed he would, as I have said, carry no staff; and thus they entered the nearest gate of the grounds. Bykes saw them and scoffed, but with discretion, and kept out of their way.