XIII
THAT evening, while the others went out to sit by the camp-fire, Silas Strong put the children to bed and lay down beside them. They begged him for a story, he had neither skill nor practice in narration, he had, as the rustic merchant is wont to say, a desire to please. He knew that he had disappointed the children and was doing his best to recover their esteem. Possibly he ought to try and be more like other folks. He rubbed his thin, sandy beard, he groped among the treasures of his memory.
Infrequently he had gone over them with Sinth or the Lady Ann, but briefly and with halting words and slow reflection. He had that respect for the past which is a characteristic of the true historian, but, in his view, it gave him little to say of his own exploits. He was wont to observe, ironically, that others knew more of them than he knew himself. Owing, it may be, to his little infirmity of speech, he had never been misled into the broad way of prevarication. Brevity had been his refuge and his strength. He regarded with contempt the boastful narratives of woodsmen.
Now the siren voices of the little folks had made him thoughtful. Had he nothing to give them but disappointment? He hesitated. Then he fell, as it were, but, happily, for the sake of those two he had begun to love, and not through pride. It was a kind of modesty which caused him to reach for the candle and blow it out. Then, boldly, as it were, he began to sing a brief account of one of his own adventures. He could sing without stammering, and therefore he sang an odd and almost tuneless chant. He accepted such rhyme and rhythm as chanced to drift in upon the monotonous current of his epic; but he turned not aside for them. He sang glibly, jumping in and out of that old, melodious trail of "The Son of a Gamboleer." Strong called this unique creation of his