John Splendid | Page 5

and put off your boots!"
"Mother------" I said, but he broke in on my question.
"Come in, lad, and sit down. You are back from the brave wars you
never went to with my will, and you'll find stirring times here at your
own parish. It's the way of the Sennachies' stories."
"How is that, sir?"
"They tell, you know, that people wander far on the going foot for
adventure, and adventure is in the first turning of their native lane."
I was putting my boots off before a fire of hissing logs that filled the
big room with a fir-wood smell right homely and comforting to my
heart, and my father was doing what I should have known was my
mother's office if weariness had not left me in a sort of stupor--he was
laying on the board a stout and soldierly supper and a tankard of the red
Bordeaux wine the French traffickers bring to Loch Finne to trade for
cured herring. He would come up now and then where I sat fumbling
sleepily at my belt, and put a hand on my head, a curious unmanly sort
of thing I never knew my father do before, and I felt put-about at this
petting, which would have been more like my sister if ever I had had
the luck to have one.
"You are tired, Colin, my boy?" he said.
"A bit, father, a bit," I answered; "rough roads you know. I was landed
at break of day at Skipness and--Is mother------?"
"Sit in, laochain! Did you meet many folks on the road?"
"No, sir; as pestilent barren a journey as ever I trotted on, and the

people seemingly on the hill, for their crops are unco late in the field."
"Ay, ay, lad, so they are," said my father, pulling back his shoulders a
bit--a fairly straight wiry old man, with a name for good
swordsmanship in his younger days.
I was busy at a cold partridge, and hard at it, when I thought again how
curious it was that my father should be a-foot in the house at such time
of night and no one else about, he so early a bedder for ordinary and
never the last to sneck the outer door.
"Did you expect any one, father," I asked, "that you should be waiting
up with the collation, and the outer door unsnecked?"
"There was never an outer door snecked since you left, Colin," said he,
turning awkwardly away and looking hard into the loof of his hand like
a wife spaeing fortunes--for sheer want, I could see, of some
engagement for his eyes. "I could never get away with the notion that
some way like this at night would ye come back to Elngmore."
"Mother would miss me?"
"She did, Colin, she did; I'm not denying."
"She'll be bedded long syne, no doubt, father?"
My father looked at me and gulped at the throat.
"Bedded indeed, poor Colin," said he, "this very day in the clods of
Kilmalieu!"
And that was my melancholy home-coming to my father's house of
Elngmore, in the parish of Glcnaora, in the shire of Argile.
CHAPTER II.
--GILLESBEG GRUAMACH.
Every land, every glen or town, I make no doubt, has its own peculiar

air or atmosphere that one familiar with the same may never puzzle
about in his mind, but finds come over him with a waft at odd moments
like the scent of bog-myrtle and tansy in an old clothes-press. Our own
air in Glen Shira had ever been very genial and encouraging to me.
Even when a young lad, coming back from the low country or the
scaling of school, the cool fresh breezes of the morning and the riper
airs of the late afternoon went to my head like a mild white wine; very
heartsome too, rousing the laggard spirit that perhaps made me, before,
over-apt to sit and dream of the doing of grand things instead of putting
out a hand to do them. In Glascow the one thing that I had to grumble
most about next to the dreary hours of schooling was the clammy air of
street and close; in Germanie it was worse, a moist weakening
windiness full of foreign smells, and I've seen me that I could gaily
march a handful of leagues to get a sniff of the salt sea. Not that I was
one who craved for wrack and bilge at my nose all the time. What I
think best is a stance inland from the salt water, where the mountain air,
brushing over gall and heather, takes the sting from the sea air, and the
two blended give a notion of the fine variousness of life. We had a
herdsman once in Elrigmore, who could tell five miles up