hunters scourged the Indians in revenge for his wife and children slain and his cabin burnt while he was away hunting; and of other border heroes, whose names have not lived as long.

In Wetheral's earlier reminiscences, the name that oftenest reached Dick's ears, and most agreeably impressed them, was that of Tom MacAlister, a former fellow Jacobite, whom Wetheral had thought killed at Culloden, but who had turned up, to his great surprise and joy, a sergeant in Braddock's army in America, in 1755. Surviving Braddock's defeat, he had retreated with the remnant of the British army, and since then Wetheral had neither seen nor heard of him. Of all the characters that figured in his father's stories, Dick made MacAlister his favorite. This was not only on account of the warlike deeds he had done, or the jests he had perpetrated, or the comical scrapes he had figured in, or the pithy sayings that Wetheral quoted from him, or the fact that he had served as a soldier in many lands, but also for a circumstance connected with Dick's early acquired love of song. When Dick would express a liking for some particular one of the many tunes his father whistled or sang, the father would say to the mother:

"You ought to hear Tom MacAlister play that on his fiddle or pipe, Betty!"

And when the boy, pleased with the words of some ballad of which his father had remembered but a part, would eagerly demand the rest, the father would usually say:

"I don't know it, Dickie, lad. If Tom MacAlister were here, he could sing it all for you."

Thus Dick came to think of this Tom MacAlister, whom he had never seen, and could with little reason expect ever to see, as the source, of at least the repository, of all the songs that ever were written, and all the tunes that ever were composed. Dick dearly loved the sound of a fiddle, and whenever there was a wedding anywhere in the sparsely settled neighborhood he would beg his parents to take him behind one of them on horseback, or to let him go with John Campbell, that he might enjoy the scraping of the fiddles, while the rustic guests danced, and made merry with rum, hard cider, and peach brandy.

If he could only hear Tom MacAlister play the pipe or fiddle! If he could but once see that hero in the flesh, touch the hands that had performed so many acts of valor, behold the face that had been turned towards so many foes, hear the voice that had uttered so much wisdom, sung so many ballads, and could tell so many true tales of marvellous experience! To Dick, this much-talked-of Tom, who might no longer be among the living, was as a hero of legend, a Jack the Giant Killer, a Mr. Greatheart, a Robinson Crusoe.

Some of the songs sung by Dick's father, and by his mother, too, who had picked up most of her tunes from her husband, were Jacobite ballads. One snowy day, in Dick's fifth winter, his father, mending a bridle beside the fire, was heard by Dick to sing in a low voice: