What appeared to her most odd,
most inconsistent, and was indeed of all his peculiarities alone
distasteful to her, was his delight in what she regarded only as
the menial and dirty occupation of cleaning lamps and candlesticks;
the poetic side of it, rendered tenfold poetic by his blindness,
she never saw.
Then he had such tales to tell her--of mountain, stream, and
lake; of love and revenge; of beings less and more than natural
--brownie and Boneless, kelpie and fairy; such wild legends also,
haunting the dim emergent peaks of mist swathed Celtic history; such
songs--come down, he said, from Ossian himself--that sometimes
she would sit and listen to him for hours together.
It was no wonder then that she should win the heart of the simple
old man speedily and utterly; for what can bard desire beyond a
true listener--a mind into which his own may, in verse or tale or
rhapsody, in pibroch or coronach, overflow? But when, one evening,
in girlish merriment, she took up his pipes, blew the bag full,
and began to let a highland air burst fitfully from the chanter,
the jubilation of the old man broke all the bounds of reason. He
jumped from his seat and capered about the room, calling her all
the tenderest and most poetic names his English vocabulary would
afford him; then abandoning the speech of the Sassenach, as if
in despair of ever uttering himself through its narrow and rugged
channels, overwhelmed her with a cataract of soft flowing Gaelic,
returning to English only as his excitement passed over into
exhaustion--but in neither case aware of the transition.
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