The toils of the day were over, the supper things cleared away, and the door closed for the night. Moodie had taken up his flute, the sweet companion of happier days, at the earnest request of our homesick Scotch servant-girl, to cheer her drooping spirits by playing some of the touching national airs of the glorious mountain land, the land of chivalry and song, the heroic North. Before retiring to rest, Bell, who had an exquisite ear for music, kept time with foot and hand, while large tears gathered in her soft blue eyes.
“Ay, 'tis bonnie thae songs; but they mak' me greet, an' my puir heart is sair, sair when I think on the bonnie braes and the days o'lang syne.”
Poor Bell! Her heart was among the hills, and mine had wandered far, far away to the green groves and meadows of my own fair land. The music and our reveries were alike abruptly banished by a sharp blow upon the door. Bell rose and opened it, when a strange, wild-looking lad, barefooted, and with no other covering to his head than the thick, matted locks of raven blackness that hung like a cloud over his swarthy, sunburnt visage, burst into the room.
“Guidness defend us! Wha ha'e we here?” screamed Bell, retreating into a corner. “The puir callant's no cannie.”
My husband turned hastily round to meet the intruder, and I raised the candle from the table the better to distinguish his face; while Bell, from her hiding-place, regarded him with unequivocal glances of fear and mistrust, waving her hands to me, and pointing significantly to the open door, as if silently beseeching me to tell her master to turn him out.
“Shut the door, man,” said Moodie, whose long scrutiny of the strange being before us seemed upon the whole satisfactory; “we shall be frozen.”
“Thin faith, sir, that's what I am,” said the lad, in a rich brogue, which told, without asking, the country to which he belonged. Then stretching his bare hands to the fire, he continued, “By Jove, sir, I was never so near gone in my life!”
“Where do you come from, and what is your business here? You must be aware that this is a very late hour to take a house by storm in this way.”
“Thrue for you, sir. But necessity knows no law; and the condition you see me in must plade for me. First, thin, sir, I come from the township of D——, and want a masther; and next to that, bedad! I want something to ate. As I'm alive, and 'tis a thousand pities that I'm alive at all at all, for shure God Almighty never made sich a misfortunate crather afore nor since; I have had nothing to put in my head since I ran away from my ould masther, Mr. F——, yesterday at noon. Money I have none, sir; the divil a cent. I have neither a shoe to my foot nor a hat to my head, and if you refuse to shelter me the night, I must be contint to perish in the snow, for I have not a frind in the wide wurld.”
The lad covered his face with his hands, and sobbed aloud.