Weel, there was Murdoch, and me, and the third of our party on that tour was Miss Jessie MacLachlan, a bonnie lassie with a glorious voice, the best of our Scottish prima donnas then.  We wandered all over the north and the midlands of Scotland on that tour, and it was a grand success.  Our audiences were large, and they were generous wi’ their applause, too, which Scottish audiences sometimes are not.  Your Scot is a canny yin; he’ll aye tak’ his pleasures seriously.  He’ll let ye ken it, richt enough, and fast enough, if ye do not please him.  But if ye do he’s like to reckon that he paid you to do so, and so why should he applaud ye as weel?

But so well did we do on the tour that I began to do some thinkin’.  Here were we, Murdoch and I, especially, drawing the audiences.  What was Munro doing for rakin’ in the best part o’ the siller folk paid to hear us?  Why, nothin’ at all that we could no do our twa selves—­so I figured.  And it hurt me sair to see Munro gettin’ siller it seemed to me Murdoch and I micht just as weel be sharing between us.  Not that I didna like Munro fine, ye’ll ken; he was a gude manager, and a fair man.  But it was just the way I was feeling, and I told Murdoch so.

“Ye hae richt, Harry,” he said.  “There’s sense in your head, man, wee though you are.  What’ll we do?”

“Why, be our ain managers!” I said.  “We’ll take out a concert party of our own next season.”

At the end of the tour of twelve weeks Mac and I were more determined than ever to do just that.  For the time we’d spent we had a hundred pounds apiece to put in the bank, after we’d paid all our expenses—­ more money than I’d dreamed of being able to save in many years.  And so we made our plans.

But we were no sae sure, afterward, that we’d been richt.  We planned our tour carefully.  First we went all aboot, to the towns we planned to visit, distributing bills that announced our coming.  Shopkeepers were glad to display them for us for a ticket or so, and it seemed that folk were interested, and looking forward to having us come.  But if they were they did not show it in the only practical way—­the only way that gladdens a manager’s heart.  They did not come to our concerts in great numbers; indeed, an’ they scarcely came at a’.  When it was all over and we came to cast up the reckoning we found we’d lost a hundred and fifty pounds sterling—­no small loss for two young and ambitious artists to have to pocket.

“Aye, an’ I can see where the manager has his uses,” I said to Mac.  “He takes the big profits—­but he takes the big risks, too.”

“Are ye discouraged, man Harry!” Mac asked me.

“Not a bit of it!” said I.  “If you’re not, I’m not.  I’ll try it again.  What do you say, Mac?”