And now we come to the affair of the Slugs.  Corp had got a holiday, and they were off together fishing the Drumly Water, by Lord Rintoul’s permission.  They had fished the Drumly many a time without it, and this was to be another such day as those of old.  The one who woke at four was to rouse the other.  Never had either waked at four; but one of them was married now, and any woman can wake at any hour she chooses, so at four Corp was pushed out of bed, and soon thereafter they took the road.  Grizel’s blinds were already up.  “Do you mind,” Corp said, “how often, when we had boasted we were to start at four and didna get roaded till six, we wriggled by that window so that Grizel shouldna see us?”

“She usually did see us,” Tommy replied ruefully.  “Grizel always spotted us, Corp, when we had anything to hide, and missed us when we were anxious to be seen.”

“There was no jouking her,” said Corp.  “Do you mind how that used to bother you?” a senseless remark to a man whom it was bothering still—­or shall we say to a boy?  For the boy came back to Tommy when he heard the Drumly singing; it was as if he had suddenly seen his mother looking young again.  There had been a thunder-shower as they drew near, followed by a rush of wind that pinned them to a dike, swept the road bare, banged every door in the glen, and then sank suddenly as if it had never been, like a mole in the sand.  But now the sun was out, every fence and farm-yard rope was a string of diamond drops.  There was one to every blade of grass; they lurked among the wild roses; larks, drunken with song, shook them from their wings.  The whole earth shone so gloriously with them that for a time Tommy ceased to care whether he was admired.  We can pay nature no higher compliment.

But when they came to the Slugs!  The Slugs of Kenny is a wild crevice through which the Drumly cuts its way, black and treacherous, into a lovely glade where it gambols for the rest of its short life; you would not believe, to see it laughing, that it had so lately escaped from prison.  To the Slugs they made their way—­not to fish, for any trout that are there are thinking for ever of the way out and of nothing else, but to eat their luncheon, and they ate it sitting on the mossy stones their persons had long ago helped to smooth, and looking at a roan-branch, which now, as then, was trailing in the water.

There were no fish to catch, but there was a boy trying to catch them.  He was on the opposite bank; had crawled down it, only other boys can tell how, a barefooted urchin of ten or twelve, with an enormous bagful of worms hanging from his jacket button.  To put a new worm on the hook without coming to destruction, he first twisted his legs about a young birch, and put his arms round it.  He was after a big one, he informed Corp, though he might as well have been fishing in a treatise on the art of angling.

Corp exchanged pleasantries with him; told him that Tommy was Captain Ure, and that he was his faithful servant Alexander Bett, both of Edinburgh.  Since the birth of his child, Corp had become something of a humourist.  Tommy was not listening.  As he lolled in the sun he was turning, without his knowledge, into one of the other Tommies.  Let us watch the process.