So Kit Kennedy cheerfully went in to prayers and thanksgiving, thinking himself not ill off.  He had had his breakfast.

And Tweed and Tyke, the beasts that perish, put their noses into the porridge-pot to see if Kit Kennedy had left anything.  There was not so much as a single grain of meal.

THE BACK O’ BEYONT

  I

  O nest, leaf-hidden, Dryad’s green alcove,
      Half-islanded by hill-brook’s seaward rush,
        My lovers still bower, where none may come but I! 
    Where in clear morning prime and high noon hush
      With only some old poet’s book I lie! 
        Sometimes a lonely dove
    Calleth her mate, or droning honey thieves
      Weigh down the bluebell’s nodding campanule;
      And ever singeth through the twilight cool
    Low voice of water and the stir of leaves.

  II

  Perfect are August’s golden afternoons! 
      All the rough way across the fells, a peal
        Of joy-bells ring, not heard by alien ear. 
    The jealous brake and close-shut beech conceal
      The sweet bower’s queen and mine, albeit I hear
        Hummed scraps of dear old tunes,
    I push the boughs aside, and lo, I look
      Upon a sight to make one more than wise,—­
      A true maid’s heart, shining from tender eyes,
    Rich with love’s lore, unlearnt in any book.

  “Memory Harvest.”

“An’ what brings the lang-leggit speldron howkin’ an’ scrauchlin’ owre the Clints o’ Drumore an’ the Dungeon o’ Buchan?” This was a question which none of Roy Campbell’s audience felt able to answer.  But each grasped his rusty Queen’s-arm musket and bell-mouthed horse-pistol with a new determination.  The stranger, whoever he might be, was manifestly unsafe.  Roy Campbell had kept the intruder under observation for some time through the weather-beaten ship’s prospect-glass which he had stayed cumbrously on the edge of a rock.  The man was poking about among rocks and debris at the foot of one of the cliffs in which the granite hills break westward towards the Atlantic.

Roy Campbell, the watcher, was a grey-headed man, slack in the twist but limber in the joints—­distinguished by a constant lowering of the eye and a spasmodic twitching of the corners of the mouth.  He was active and nimble, and in moments of excitement much given to spitting Gaelic oaths like a wild-cat.  But, spite his half-century of life, he was still the best and the most daring man of a company who had taken daring as their stock-in-trade.

It was in the palmy days of the traffic with the Isle of Man, when that tight little island supplied the best French brandy for the drouthy lairds of half Scotland, also lace for the “keps” and stomachers of their dames, not to speak of the Sabbath silks of the farmer’s goodwife, wherein she brawly showed that she had as proper a respect for herself in the house of God as my lady herself.