four-and-twenty hours. De Lissac was gone. Edie was gone. Napoleon
had escaped. War had broken out. Jim Horscroft had lost everything,
and he and I were setting out to fight against the French. It was all
like a dream, until I tramped off to the coach that evening, and looked
back at the grey farm steading and at the two little dark figures: my
mother with her face sunk in her Shetland shawl, and my father waving
his drover's stick to hearten me upon my way.



CHAPTER XI.


THE GATHERING OF THE NATIONS.

And now I come to a bit of my story that clean takes my breath away as I
think of it, and makes me wish that I had never taken the job of telling
it in hand. For when I write I like things to come slow and orderly and
in their turn, like sheep coming out of a paddock. So it was at West
Inch. But now that we were drawn into a larger life, like wee bits of
straw that float slowly down some lazy ditch, until they suddenly find
themselves in the dash and swirl of a great river; then it is very hard
for me with my simple words to keep pace with it all. But you can find
the cause and reason of everything in the books about history, and so I
shall just leave that alone and talk about what I saw with my own eyes
and heard with my own ears.

The regiment to which our friend had been appointed was the 71st
Highland Light Infantry, which wore the red coat and the trews, and had
its depot in Glasgow town. There we went, all three, by coach: the