lord speaking and reading frae a paper, and by him a surpliced man to gie a prayer, and there was a banner pole, and it went up high, and it had a gowd ball atop.  The braw lord stopped speaking, and all the Hielandmen and Lowlandmen drew and held up and brandished their claymores and swords.  The flash ran around like the levin.  I kenned that they shouted, all thae gay shadows!  I saw the pipers’ cheeks fill with wind, and the bags of the pipes fill.  Then ane drew on a fine silken rope, and up the pole there went a braw silken banner, and it sailed out in the wind.  And there was mair shouting and brandishing.  But what think ye might next befall?  That gowden ball, gowden like the sun before it drops, that topped the pole, it fell!  I marked it fall, and the heads dodge, and it rolled upon the ground....  And then all went out like a candle that you blaw upon.  I was kneeling by the water, and Jock’s sark in my hand, and the lav’rock singing, and that was all.”

“I have heard tell of that,” said Strickland.  “It was near Braemar.”

“And that’s mony a lang league frae here!  Sax days, and we had news of the rising, with the gathering at Braemar.  And said he wha told us, ’The gilt ball fell frae the standard pole, and there’s nane to think that a good omen!’ But I saw it,” said Mother Binning.  She turned her wheel, a woman not yet old and with a large, tranquil comeliness.  “What I see makes fine company!”

Strickland plucked a rose and smelled it.  “This country is fuller of such things than is England that I come from.”

“Aye.  It’s a grand country.”  She continued to spin.  The tutor looked at the sun.  It was time to be going if he wished another hour with the stream.  He took up his rod and book and rose from the door-step.  Mother Binning glanced aside from her wheel.

“How gaes things with the lad at the House?”

“Alexander or James?”

“The one ye call Alexander.”

“That is his name.”

“I think that he’s had ithers.  That’s a lad of mony lives!”

Strickland, halting by the rose-bush, looked at Mother Binning.  “I suppose we call it ‘wisdom’ when two feel alike.  Now that’s just what I feel about Alexander Jardine!  It’s just feeling without rationality.”

“Eh?”

“There isn’t any reason in it.”

“I dinna know about ‘reason.’  There’s being in it.”

The tutor made as if to speak further, then, with a shake of his head, thought better of it.  Thirty-five years old, he had been a tutor since he was twenty, dwelling, in all, in four or five more or less considerable houses and families.  Experience, adding itself to innate good sense, had made him slow to discuss idiosyncrasies of patrons or pupils.  Strong perplexity or strong feeling might sometimes drive him, but ordinarily he kept a rein on speech.  Now he looked around him.

“What high summer, lovely weather!”