“O don’t go, Miggie—don’t go! I cannot let you leave me!”
And the lad, with tears in his dark eyes, had really to tear himself away.
Even Reeves himself was affected.
I do not remember ever before having met so happy and bright a young fellow as Miguel. He was very good-looking, rather tall, and though somewhat slender to suit a Highlander’s taste, supple and energetic beyond compare.
At the university (Aberdeen) he excelled in all sports that required more agility than strength. He never went in for wrestling, putting the stone, or hammer-throwing. But in racing he needed handicapping. No one was in it with him at the running-high-leap. Sometimes, when sudden “funk” seized him just as he approached the bar, he ran right through under it laughing, and without even bending his neck. But he returned immediately and took it like a hero.
He was, moreover, a fairly good bagpiper, having once come in second at a meeting where some Gordon Highlanders competed. People said his legs were the best of him. He had a good “sonsy” calf, and could not have got inside those ridiculous leather drain-pipes that English mashers wear. Consequently he looked well in the kilt, and wherever he choose to compete, he took first prize in Highland dancing.
Miguel was a capital linguist, talking Spanish and French as easily as English.
But I am sure it was as a humorous conversationalist that he excelled.
No matter what kind of company he happened to be thrown into, Miguel kept them laughing just all the time. It was worth walking twenty miles just to hear him talk. And, mind, there was no braggadocio about him, very little anecdote either; if he did throw in a story now and then, he did so half-apologetically. It interrupted the flow of conversation, he used to remark.
Perhaps I ought not to say just here that Miguel was in every way a gentleman; I ought rather to let his doings prove it. Well, pardon me.