"'Just man,' says I to him. 'Health to you and a hunter's hunger! I was looking at you yonder in the kirk, and a gentleman more like my clansman Sandy Ruadh of Salen is surely not within the four brown borders of the world nor on the deeps of ocean. Your father must have come from the Western Isles, or the mother of you been wandering.'
"Of all I said to him he knew but the one word that means the same thing, as they tell me, in all Celtdom—eaglais. To his feet got the Frenchman, stretched out to me his bread and wine, with a half-laugh on him most desperate like Uncle Sandy, and said eaglais too, with a flourish of the heel of his loaf at the kirk behind him to show he understood that, anyway. We sat on the slab, the pair of us, my pipes stretched out between us, and there I assure, folk, was the hour of conversation!"
"But if you could not speak each other's tongue?" said a girl.
"Tach! two men of the breed with a set of pipes between them can always follow one another. 'Tis my belief if I stood his words on end and could follow them backwards they would be good Gaelic of Erin. The better half of our speech was with our hands; he had not even got the English; and most of the time we talked pipe-music, as any man can do that's fit to pucker his lips and whistle. The Breton people canntarach tunes too, like ourselves—soft-warbling them to fix them in the memory, and blyth that morning was our warbling; he could charm, my man, the very thrush from trees! But Herself—the piob mhor—was an instrument beyond his fingering; the pipes he used at home he called biornieu, fashioned differently from ours. Yet the same wind blows through reeds in France or Scotland, and everywhere they sing of old and simple things; you are deaf indeed if you cannot understand.
"He was from the seashore—John his name—a mariner to his trade—with a wife and seven children; himself the son of a cooper.
"I am a good hand at the talking myself, as little Margaret here will tell you, but his talk was like a stream in spate, and the arms of him went flourishing like drum-sticks. Keep mind of this—that the two of us, by now, were all alone in the kirk-yard, on a little hillock with the great big cliff of a kirk above us, and the town below all humming with the soldiers, like a byke of bees.
"He bade me play on the pipes at last and I put them in my oxter and gave him 'Lochiel's awa' to France.' A fine tune! but someway I felt I never reached him. I tried him then with bits of 'The Bugle Horn,' 'Take your gun to the Hill,' 'Bonnie Ann' and 'The Persevering Lover;' he beat time with a foot to them, and clapped my shoulder, but for all that they said to him I might as well be playing on a fiddle.
"It was only when I tried an old port-mor—"The Spoil of the Lowlands now graze in the Glen" that his whiskers bristled, and at that said I to myself 'I have you Uncle Sandy!'
"Before the light that flickered was gone from him I blew it up to a height again with 'Come to me Kinsman!'