Finally, they came to a high iron fence through the gates of which no one could go without a passport or permit. The small boy shied away from this public entrance, followed the fence around to its joining with the wall. There, stuffed between fence and concrete floor, was a bagpipe almost as big as the child himself. He stooped over and tugged at it. It wouldn’t budge.
Nan knelt down and tugged, too. Between the two of them, after much twisting and turning, pushing and pulling, the bagpipe was pulled through. The child swung a strap over his shoulder, looked up at her brightly now, and with a “thank ye, thank ye” ran along ahead of her playing “On the Bonnie Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond.”
She saw him once again before she left the station. It was just before the train pulled out. He stood beneath her compartment window and played the same tune again. This time tourists were throwing pennies and ha’pennies at his feet and he was smiling broadly.
He waved up at Nan and called, “Noo ane for ye.” She laughed and nodded, as he swung into the tune a third time. At the end, Nan tossed him a coin. He fingered it carefully, his Scotch thrift fighting with his feeling of gratitude, but finally the better man won and he threw it back up to her.
The sound of his playing was still in her ears as the train pulled out for Emberon. Though she could not have known it then, the single tune that he knew was to be a kind of theme song playing itself most unexpectedly through her Emberon experience.
The ride from Glasgow, Great Britain’s second largest city, to Emberon, a small village on the coast of one of Scotland’s many fjords took only a few hours.
“It was a short ride,” Nan wrote later to her mother, “from Glasgow to Emberon, but such fun! The trains were queer, like those you see sometimes in the movie with a corridor the whole length of each car. The passengers all sit in little compartments that have two seats facing one another. We all sat together, of course. Laura, Bess, and Dr. Beulah were on one side and Grace, Rhoda, Amelia, and myself on the other. When we ate, as we did soon after we were outside the city, the steward pulled a little table down between us so that we were really quite snug and cozy.
“It was nice, eating Scotch broth (and how good it was!) while a Scotch landscape unwound itself at your side. I say this now, but, really, we were so excited that we hardly knew at all what was happening. Oh, mother, we are seeing so many strange new things all the time that my tongue can hardly keep up with my eyes! When I get home I’m going to talk and talk and talk until you feel as though you had taken the trip yourself, but then you and Papa know all about it, because you were here not long ago.
“You’d be surprised how many people I meet who remember you. The old coachman who met us at the station, the people in the village, oh, everyone here, tells me what a nice mother and father I have, until sometimes I grow very lonesome to see you. I got your cable at Glasgow. I am being very careful, truly, and I will write you all about everything when I get to Edinburgh where I am hoping there will be some letters from you. Until then—
My love,
Nan.”
“Until then”—the words were simple, but how much was to happen “until then.”