This still more astonished the peasant lad, who seemed as though he would again fall upon his antagonist. But there was something about the youth's straight, well-knit figure, his handsome face, and flashing eye that caused him to reflect; whereupon he lowered his fists, which had risen to the bravado of attack, and, in a less defiant tone, said: "Weel, let me hae Meg, an' I'll say naethin' aboot ta stick." "Promise me not to beat her then." The young callant gave the required undertaking, and the next minute he had the shrinking little animal in his arms and was walking away with it the way he had come. But, turning round when he had gone a few rods, he saw the youth who had withstood him bending over the stream, laving his face in the cool water. Now, for the first time, Tam, as he was called, noticed something about the boys which in his anger he had failed to mark. It was not their dress--though that betokened rank above the common; it was something more intimate than that; something in the air, in the manner, of them which made him uneasy in his mind, and caused him to steal home with lagging gait and eyes that sought the ground. His home was a little bracken-thatched one-storey cottage, or hut, with stone walls, planted in a green oasis of a few yards square, amid a wilderness of rock and shingle, overgrown with moss and heather and other rough vegetation, from which a few stray sheep and stunted cattle gathered a scanty subsistence. These were Tam's charge. For not far from the little two-roomed cot which he called his home were other huts like it, inhabited by poor, hard-working people like his grandparents, each having a few sheep, or a cow or two, and one or another a donkey or wild-looking Highland pony; and he, having to look after his grandfather's little stock, was paid a trifle by the others to tend theirs too. Tam Jamison had done this since he was five, at which age he was left an orphan by the death of his mother, who died broken-hearted at the loss of her husband, fighting in a distant land against Britain's foes. He was now twelve; and though he loved the braes and the mountain streams, he was beginning to chafe at his narrow life, wanting to be off now with the drovers, now with the sportsmen and gillies, or the coachmen who drove their teams daily in the season past his grandfather's croft. It was a hard task for the old folks, Donal and Yetta Jamison, to retain him at home, impossible to make him content. They did their best to keep him under control; but it was chiefly done by coaxing, a good deal by petting. This in the end did not lighten their task. Every day Tam became more wayward and difficult; every other day there were complaints of his negligence on the one hand, of his mischief on the other; and then, to cap all, it came to the old people's ears that their Tam--it could be no other--had dared to raise his fist against one of the princes of the blood, no less than the Prince of Wales.