The Standard Bearer

by S. R. Crockett

“Can you tell me which is the sixth commandment?” says he.

“Thou shalt not kill!” answers Quintin, as simple as supping brose.

“Then, are you a murderer or no—this morning?”

Quintin, thinking that, after the fashion of the time, the Regent meant some divinity quirk or puzzle, laid his brains asteep, and answered that as he had certainly “hated his brother,” in that sense he was doubtless, like all the rest of the human race, technically and theologically a murderer.

“But,” said the Professor, “what of the Highland Grant lad that ye felled like a bullock yestreen under my window?”

Now it had never struck me that I was like my brother Quintin in outward appearance, save in the way that all we black MacClellans are like one another—long in the nose, bushy in the eyebrows, which mostly reach over to meet one another. And I grant it that Quintin was ever better mettle for a lass’s eye than I—though not worth a pail of calf’s feed in the matter of making love as love ought to be made, which counts more with women than all fine appearings.

But for the nonce let that fly stick to the wall; at any rate, sure it is that the Professor loon had taken me for Quintin.

Now it will greatly help those who read this chronicle to remember what Quintin did on this occasion. I would not have cared a doit if he had said, in the plain hearing of the class, that it was his brother Hob the Lothian packman who had felled the Red Grant.

But would the lad betray his brother? No! He rather hung his head, and said no more than that he heard the Red Grant was not seriously hurt. For as he said afterwards, “I did not know what such a tribe of angry, dirked Highlandmen might have done to you, Hob, if they had so much as guessed it was no colleger’s fist which had taken Donald an inch beneath the ear.

“Then,” said the Regent to Quintin, “my warrior of Wild Whigdom, you may set to the learning of thirty psalms by heart in the original Hebrew. And after you have said them without the book I will consider of your letters of certification from this class.”