to which he referred so lightly, how wonderful the life must have been
which had put him in the way of them! He had been kind to us, and
gracious of speech, but still I could not quite shake myself clear of
the distrust with which I had regarded him. Perhaps, after all, Jim
Horscroft had been right and I had been wrong about taking him to West
Inch.

When I got back he looked as though he had been born and bred in the
steading. He sat in the big wooden-armed ingle-chair, with the black
cat on his knee. His arms were out, and he held a skein of worsted from
hand to hand which my mother was busily rolling into a ball. Cousin
Edie was sitting near, and I could see by her eyes that she had been
crying.

"Hullo, Edie!" said I, "what's the trouble?"

"Ah! mademoiselle, like all good and true women, has a soft heart," said
he. "I didn't thought it would have moved her, or I should have been
silent. I have been talking of the suffering of some troops of which I
knew something when they were crossing the Guadarama mountains in the
winter of 1808. Ah! yes, it was very bad, for they were fine men and
fine horses. It is strange to see men blown by the wind over the
precipices, but the ground was so slippery and there was nothing to
which they could hold. So companies all linked arms, and they did
better in that fashion; but one artilleryman's hand came off as I held
it, for he had had the frost-bite for three days."

I stood staring with my mouth open.

"And the old Grenadiers, too, who were not so active as they used to be,