"Yes, Willie, his courage, man. Do you think a coward could have run away with half the coolness? With a tithe of the courage necessary for such a retreat, a man would have stood and fought till he died. Sir John must have been a fine fellow in his youth."
"In mony a droll way may a man fa' on the drap drink," remarked John; "an' meikle ill, dootless, does it do in takin' aff the edge o' the speerit—the mair if the edge be a fine razor edge, an' no the edge o' a whittle. I mind about fifty years ago, when I was a slip o' a callant,"—
"Losh, John!" exclaimed one of the lads, "hae ye been fechtin wi' the cats? sic a scrapit face!"
"Wheesht," said Ferguson; "we owe the illustration to that, but dinna interrupt the story."
"Fifty years ago, when I was a slip o' a callant," continued John, "unco curious, an' fond o' kennin everything, as callants will be,"——
"Hoot, John," said one of the students, interrupting him, "can ye no cut short, man? Rob promised last Saturday to gie us, 'Fie, let us a' to the bridal,' an' ye see the ale an' the nicht's baith wearin' dune."
"The song, Rob, the song!" exclaimed half a dozen voices at once; and John's story was lost in the clamour.
"Nay, now," said the good-natured poet, "that's less than kind; the auld man's stories are aye worth the hearing, an' he can relish the auld-warld fisher-sang wi' the best o' ye. But we maun hae the story yet."
He struck up the old Scotch ditty, "Fie let us a' to the bridal," which he sung with great power and brilliancy; for his voice was a richly modulated one, and there was a fulness of meaning imparted to the words which wonderfully heightened the effect. "How strange it is," he remarked to me when he had finished, "that our English neighbours deny us humour! The songs of no country equal our Scotch ones in that quality. Are you acquainted with 'The Guidwife of Auchtermuchty?'"