Malcolm persuaded him however to lie down
a while and hear him play, and succeeded, strange as it may seem
with such an instrument, in lulling him to sleep. But he had not
slept more than five minutes when he sprung from the bed, wide awake,
crying--"My poy, Malcolm! my son! you haf let her sleep in; and
ta creat peoples will be impatient for her music, and cursing her
in teir hearts!"
Nothing would quiet him but the immediate commencement of the process
of dressing, the result of which was, as I have said, even pathetic,
from its intermixture of shabbiness and finery. The dangling brass
capped tails of his sporran in front, the silver mounted dirk on
one side, with its hilt of black oak carved into an eagle's head,
and the steel basket of his broadsword gleaming at the other; his
great shoulder brooch of rudely chased brass; the pipes with their
withered bag and gaudy streamers; the faded kilt, oiled and soiled;
the stockings darned in twenty places by the hands of the termagant
Meg Partan; the brogues patched and patched until it would have
been hard to tell a spot of the original leather; the round blue
bonnet grown gray with wind and weather: the belts that looked
like old harness ready to yield at a pull; his skene dhu sticking
out grim and black beside a knee like a lean knuckle:--all combined
to form a picture ludicrous to a vulgar nature, but gently pitiful
to the lover of his kind, he looked like a half mouldered warrior,
waked from beneath an ancient cairn, to walk about in a world
other than he took it to be.
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