Clear the way for old Dan Tucker,
   He’s too late to come to supper.

Two by two they circled around, Peter in the centre singing—­

   Old Dan Tucker
   Was a fine old man—­

Then back to the right—­

   He washed his face
   In the frying-pan.

Then around in a circle hand in hand—­

   He combed his hair
      On a wagon-wheel,
   And died with the tooth-ache
      In his heel!

As they let go of their partners’ hands and went right and left, Peter made his grand dash into the circle, and when the turn of the tune came he was swinging his mother, his father had Tonald’s partner, and Tonald was in the centre in the title roll of Tucker, executing some of the most intricate steps that had ever been seen outside of the Isle of Skye.

Then the tune changed into the skirling bag-pipe lilt all Highlanders love—­and which we who know not the Gaelic profanely call “Weel may the keel row”—­and Tonald got down to his finest work.

He was in the byre now at home beyond the sea, and it is not strange faces he will be seein’, but the lads and lassies of the Glen, and it is John McNeash who holds the drone under his arm and the chanter in his hands, and the salty tang of the sea comes up to him and the peat-smoke is in his nostrils, and the pipes skirl higher and higher as Tonald McKenzie dances the dance of his forbears in a strange land.  They had seen Tonald dance before, but this was different, for it was not Tonald McKenzie alone who danced before them, but the incarnate spirit of the Highlands, the unconquerable, dauntless, lawless Highlands, with its purple hills and treacherous caverns that fling defiance at the world and fear not man nor devil.

Tonald finished with a leap as nimble as that with which a cat springs on its victim while the company watched spellbound.  He slipped away into a corner and would dance no more that night.

When twelve o’clock came, the dancing was over, and with the smell of coffee and the rattle of dishes in the kitchen it was not hard to persuade big John Kennedy to sing.

Big John lived alone in a little shanty in the hills, and the prospect of a good square meal was a pleasant one to the lonely fellow who had been his own cook so long.  Big John lived among the Crofters, whose methods of cooking were simple in the extreme, and from them he had picked up strange ways of housekeeping.  He ate out of the frying pan; he milked the cow in the porridge pot, and only took what he needed for each meal, reasoning that she had a better way of keeping it than he had.  Big John had departed almost entirely from “white man’s ways,” and lived a wild life free from the demands of society.  His ability to “call off” at dances was the one tie that bound him to the Canadian people on the plain.

“Oh, I can’t sing,” John said sheepishly, when they urged him.