It befell
one day when we were at this practice, that we came on a discourse
of friends and friendship, and I think now that we were sailing
near the wind. We said what a fine thing friendship was, and how
little we had guessed of it, and how it made life a new thing, and
a thousand covered things of the same kind that will have been
said, since the foundation of the world, by young folk in the same
predicament. Then we remarked upon the strangeness of that
circumstance, that friends came together in the beginning as if
they were there for the first time, and yet each had been alive a
good while, losing time with other people.
"It is not much that I have done," said she, "and I could be
telling you the five-fifths of it in two-three words. It is only a
girl I am, and what can befall a girl, at all events? But I went
with the clan in the year '45. The men marched with swords and
fire-locks, and some of them in brigades in the same set of tartan;
they were not backward at the marching, I can tell you. And there
were gentlemen from the Low Country, with their tenants mounted and
trumpets to sound, and there was a grant skirling of war-pipes.
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