the hundred and third psalm--

O m' anam, beannuich thus' a nis

--and raised a tune of marvellous wail. Arrived at the end of the
line, he repeated the process with the next, and so went on, giving
every line first in the voice of speech and then in the voice
of song, through three stanzas of eight lines each. And no less
strange was the singing than the tune--wild and wailful as the
wind of his native desolations, or as the sound of his own pipes
borne thereon; and apparently all but lawless, for the multitude
of so called grace notes, hovering and fluttering endlessly around
the centre tone like the comments on a text, rendered it nearly
impossible to unravel from them the air even of a known tune.
It had in its kind the same liquid uncertainty of confluent sound
which had hitherto rendered it impossible for Malcolm to learn more
than a few of the common phrases of his grandfather's mother tongue.

The psalm over, during which the sightless eyeballs of the singer
had been turned up towards the rafters of the cottage--a sign
surely that the germ of light, "the sunny seed," as Henry Vaughan
calls it, must be in him, else why should he lift his eyes when
he thought upward?--Malcolm read a chapter of the Bible, plainly
the next in an ordered succession, for it could never have been
chosen or culled; after which they kneeled together, and the old
man poured out a prayer, beginning in a low, scarcely audible voice,
which rose at length to a loud, modulated chant. Not a sentence,
hardly a phrase, of the utterance, did his grandson lay hold
of; but there were a few inhabitants of the place who could have
interpreted it, and it was commonly believed that one part of his