can speak o' kelpies and the dwarfs that bide in the hill. The heron, the lang solemn fellow, kens o' the green-wood fairies and the wood elfins; and the wild geese that squatter on the tap o' the Muneraw will croak to ye of the merrymaidens and the girls o' the pool. The wren-he that hops in the grass below the birks-has the story of the lost Ladies of the Land, which is ower auld and sad for any but the wisest to hear; and there is a wee bird bides in the heather (hill-lintie men call him) who sings the Lay of the West Wind and the glee of the Rowan Berries. But what am I talking of? What are these things to you, if ye have not first heard the Song of the Moor, which is the beginning and end o' all things."

"I have heard no songs," said the man, "save the sacred psalms o' God's kirk."

and say after me the Rune of the Heather and the Dew." And before he knew the man did as he was told, and found himself speaking strange words, while his head hummed and danced as if in a fever.

"Now lay ye down and put your ear to the earth," said the bird, and the man did so. Instantly a cloud came over his brain, and he did not feel the ground on which he lay or the keen hill-air which blew about him. He felt himself falling deep into an abysm of space, then suddenly caught up and set among the stars of heaven. Then slowly from the stillness there welled forth music, drop by drop like the clear falling of rain, and the man shuddered, for he knew that he heard the beginning of the Song of the Moor.

"Bonny sangs!" mocked the bird. "Once I flew by the hinder end o' the kirk and I keekit in. A wheen auld wives wi' mutches and a wheen solemn men wi' hosts! Be sure the Song of the Moor is no like yon."

"Me sing," cried the bird, "me that has a voice like a craw! Na, na, I canna sing it; but maybe I can take ye where ye may hear it. When I was young an auld bog-blitter did the same to me, and sae began my education. But are ye willing and brawly willing, for if ye get but a sough of it ye will never mair have an ear for other music?"

Anon it was evening, and the melody dwelled among the high soft notes which mean the coming of dark and the green light of sunset. Then the whole changed to a great pæan which rang like an organ through the earth. There were trumpet-notes in it and flute-notes and the plaint of pipes. "Come forth," it cried, "the sky is wide and it is a far cry to the world's end! The fire crackles fine o' nights below the firs and

"Then meet me at the Gled's Cleuch Head at the sun's setting," said the bird, and away it flew.

Now it seemed to the man that in a twinkling it was sunset, and he found himself at the Gled's Cleuch Head with the bird flapping in the heather before him. The place was a long rift in the hill, made green with juniper and hazel, where it was said True Thomas came to drink the water.

"Turn ye to the west," said the whaup, "and let the sun fall on your face. Then turn ye five times round about,

smoke is dear to the heart of man. Fine, too, is the sting of salt and the risp of the north wind in the sheets. Come forth, one and all, to the great lands oversea and the strange tongues and the fremit peoples! Learn before you die to follow the Piper's son, and though your old bones bleach among grey rocks, what matter, if you have had your bellyful of life and come to the land of Heart's Desire?" And then the tune fell low and witching, bringing tears to the eyes and joy to the heart; and the man knew (though no one told him) that this was the first part of the Moor Song, the Song of the Open Road,

the Lilt of the Adventurer, which shall be now and ever and to the end of days. Then the melody changed to a fiercer and sadder note. He saw his forefathers, gaunt men and terrible, run stark among woody hills. He heard the talk of the bronze-clad invader, and the jar and clangor as flint met steel. Then rose the last coronach of his own people, hiding in wild glens, starving in corries, or going hopelessly to the death. He heard the cry of Border foray, the shouts of the poor Scots as they harried Cumberland, and he himself rode in the midst of them. Then the tune fell more mournful and slow, and Flodden lay before him. He saw the flower of the Scots gentry around their king, gashed to the breast-bone, still fronting the lines of the South, though the paleness of death sat on each forehead. "The Flowers of the Forest are gone," cried the lilt, and through the long years he heard the cry of the lost, the desperate, fighting for kings over the water and princes in the heather. "Who cares?" cried the air. "Man must die, and how can he die better than in the stress of fight with his heart high and alien blood on his sword? Heigh-ho! One against twenty, a child against a host, this is the romance of life." And the man's heart swelled, for he knew (though no one told him) that this was the Song of Lost Battles, which only the great can sing before they die.

But the tune was changing, and at the change the man shivered, for the air ran up to the high notes and then down to the deeps with an eldrich cry, like a hawk's scream at night or a witch's song in the gloaming. It told of those who seek and never find, the quest that knows no fulfilment. "There is a road," it cried, "which leads to the moon and the great waters. No change-house cheers it, and it has no end; but it is a fine road, a braw road-who will follow It?" And the man knew (though no one told him) that this was the Ballad of Grey Weather, which makes him who hears it sick all the days of his life for something which he cannot name. It is the song which the birds sing on the moor in the autumn nights, and the old crow on the tree-tops hears and flaps his wing. It is the lilt which old men and

women hear in the darkening of their days, and sigh for the unforgetable; and love-sick girls get catches of it and play pranks with their lovers. It is a song so old that Adam heard it in the Garden before Eve came to comfort him, so young that from it still flows the whole joy and sorrow of earth.

Then it ceased, and all of a sudden the man was rubbing his eyes on the hillside, and watching the falling dusk. “I have heard the Song of the Moor," he said to himself, and he walked home in a daze. The whaups were crying, but none came near him, though he looked hard for the bird that had spoken with him. It may be that it was there and he did not know it, or it may be that the whole thing was only a dream; but of this I cannot say.

The next morning the man rose and went to the manse.

"I am glad to see you, Simon," said the minister, "for it will soon be the Communion season, and it is your duty to go round with the tokens."

"True," said the man, "but it was another thing I came to talk about," and he told him the whole tale.

"There are but two ways of it, Simon," said the minister. "Either ye are the victim of witchcraft or ye are a selfdeluded man. If the former (whilk I am loth to believe), then it behoves ye to watch and pray lest ye enter into temptation. If the latter, then ye maun put a strict watch over a vagrom fancy, and ye'll be quit o' siccan whigmaleeries."

Now Simon was not listening but staring out of the window. "There was another thing I had it in my mind to say," said he. "I have come to lift my lines, for I am thinking of leaving the place."

"And where would ye go?" asked the minister, aghast.

"I was thinking of going to Carlisle and trying my luck as a dealer, or maybe pushing on with droves to the South."

"But that's a cauld country where there are no faithfu' ministrations," said the minister.

"Maybe so, but I am not caring very muckle about ministrations," said the

man, and the other looked after him in horror.

When he left the manse he went to a wise woman, who lived on the left side of the kirkyard above Threepdaidle burn-foot. She was very old and sat by the ingle day and night waiting upon death. To her he told the same tale.

She listened gravely, nodding with her head. "Ach," she said, "I have heard a like story before. And where will you be going?"

"I am going south to Carlisle to try the dealing and droving," said the man, "for I have some skill of sheep."

"And will ye bide there?" she asked. "Maybe aye, and maybe no," he said. “I had half a mind to push on to the big town or even to the abroad. A man must try his fortune."

"That is the way of men," said the old wife. "I, too, have heard the Song of the Moor, and many women, who now sit decently spinning in Kilmaclavers, have heard it. But a woman may hear it and lay it up in her soul and bide at hame, while a man, if he gets but a glisk of it in his fool's heart, must needs up and awa' to the warld's end on some daft-like ploy. But gang your ways and fare ye weel. My cousin Francis heard it, and he went north wi' a white cockade in his bonnet and a

sword at his side, singing 'Charlie's

come hame.' And Tam Crichtoun o' the Bourhopehead got a sough o' it one simmer's morning, and the last we heard o' Tam he was killed among the Frenchmen fechting like a fair deil. Once I heard a tinkler play a sprig of it on the pipes, and a' the lads were wud to follow him. Gang your ways, for I am near the end of mine." And the old wife shook with her coughing.

So the man put up his belongings in a pack on his back and went whistling

down the Great South Road.

Whether or not this tale have a moral it is not for me to say. The king (who told it me) said that it had, and quoted a scrap of Latin, for he had been at Oxford in his youth before he fell heir to his kingdom. "One may hear tunes from the Song of the Moor," said he, "in the thick of a storm on the scarp of a rough hill, in the low June weather,

or in the silence of a winter's night. But let none," he added, "pray to have the full music, for it will make him who hears it a footsore traveller in the ways o' the world and a masterless man till death."

JOHN BUCHAN.

From Blackwood's Magazine.

THAKUR PERTAB SINGH : A TALE OF AN INDIAN FAMINE.

PART I.

THE VILLAGE.

A wide plain, level as the face of the ocean, fading away into the horizon. Not a rise to break the dead even monotony, except that ridge of hillocks away to the east piled up from the sandy soil by the persistent efforts of the hot west wind. The fields are a dull grey color. Even here where the earth is light and sandy it looks hard and cruel. The short stubble shorn with a sickle to the very root by а hand that can afford to waste nothing, not even an inch of barley straw, is on the ground still. Amongst it are a few weeds; and they alone keep green,.. how you may well wonder. There are no hedges. The small fields, seldom larger than half an acre, are marked off from each other by low narrow ridges of earth a foot or two in width, forming boundaries which are respected by the plough. They bear a little creeping grass, succulent and sweet, good feeding for the cattle. Here and there on these narrow margins, especorners cially where the of several a thorny fields meet, are thickets of shrub, and now and again a graceful acacia whose feathery leaves hardly throw a shade.

Far away, planted probably along a road, you can see a straight avenue of large and spreading trees. Yes, it is the highroad, and on one side of it, the side nearest to us, there is what looks like a thick plantation. It is a mango grove, and you may be sure the village is not far from it. You cannot discern

it, but if you look closely-the atmosphere is so dense with heat-haze and dust that every outline is blurred as by a channel fog,—you will make out a white spire, obtuse in shape, rising a few feet above what appears to be a mound of earth. That is the village temple, and the mound is the collection of mud houses which form the village. It is quite two miles away. The afternoon sun is beating fiercely down on the scorched earth. It strikes your head just under the shade of your hat. The wind is blowing hotter and fiercer than the blast from the stokehole of a steamer. Now and then it is seized with a fit of fury, and tears up the dust and sand from the earth it hates and casts them up in a blinding cloud. There on the road, where it finds a clear course marked out and given up to it, the wind whirls up the finely powdered earth into a dust devil and urges it along the track at racing speed. To hell with you, it says, to hell.

No wonder that there is no sign of life in the fields. Ah! but there is some. There, four or five fields off, is a man scuffling away at the ground. A hasty glance might miss seeing him, his color mingles so with that of the earth. He is naked to the waist; he is scraping up grass from one of the ridges between the fields. When he has gathered enough, he will take from his head the big coarse cloth which serves him as a turban, and will carry his grass in it. Farther off are others, men and women, occupied in a like way. Others are cutting branches from the thorny bushes, to be chopped up as fodder for the beasts. Until the rain comes, what else can be done? Those whitish specks away there towards the sand-hillocks are cattle. There will be a boy or two herding them, little black fellows with a scanty loin-cloth and a long bamboo, only you cannot see them.

We will walk on to the village, where at least there will be shade and a drink of water to be had, although, if you are wise, you will bear with your thirst until the sun goes down. The trees in the

mango grove do not seem to feel the heat. They are green and fresh, and their shade is grateful, yet the hot wind comes off from them with a heavy sickly breath. Up there on that withered branch is a crow sitting with his beak wide open gasping for air; there are more gasping crows on the trees beyond. In this weather one feels pity even for an Indian crow. Here on the outskirts of the village is a huge pipal-tree. How juicy and fresh its polished leaves look! It seems able to find moisture anywhere, even in the dry centuries-old bricks of that ruined wall from which another big tree of the tribe is growing. But this one has a whole territory to itself. Its huge trunk is like a fluted column, spreading out at the base to grip the earth, while the branches stretch out wide and low on every side for sixty feet and more. A little shrine built of bricks and smeared with red paint stands close in to one side of the trunk, and from one of the lower branches hangs a round pot of baked clay with water in it. A small hole in the bottom with a bit of rag lets the water trickle down drop by drop on a smooth cone of black stone, the symbol of fertility. The road narrows now as we near the village, and takes a gentle slope downward-not that there is much difference in the level, but it has been worn down by the tread of men and cattle and the grinding of the heavy misshapen cartwheels ever since the village became a village in the far-off time. Earth, too, has been stolen from it after each rainy season, to restore those high narrow banks that protect the fields on either side from the cattle as they come and go. For these fields near the homestead are the best. It is easier to cart manure to them, and they get all the refuse from the houses. They can be watered, moreover, from wells and from the three or four slimy ponds or holes from which the clay was taken to build the mud huts and to make bricks for the better houses. Even now in this furnace of heat these fields are fresh and green,-this one with the bright shoots of the sugarcane, that