190

200

210

Then up, and with the fighting men
To march away from here,

Till the cry of the great war-pipe
Shall drown it in my ear!"

Where flew King George's ensign
The plaided soldiers went:
They drew the sword in Germany,
In Flanders pitched the tent.
The bells of foreign cities

Rang far across the plain:
They passed the happy Rhine,

They drank the rapid Main.
Through Asiatic jungles

The Tartans filed their way,
And the neighing of the war-pipes

Struck terror in Cathay.3

"Many a name have I heard," he thought,

"In all the tongues of men,

Full many a name both here and there,
Full many both now and then.

When I was at home in my father's house
In the land of the naked knee,

Between the eagles that fly in the lift

And the herrings that swim in the sea, And now that I am a captain-man

With a braw cockade in my

hat

Many a name have I heard," he thought, "But never a name like that."

TICONDEROGA

III. THE PLACE OF THE NAME

There fell a war in a woody place,

Lay far across the sea,

A war of the march in the mirk midnight
And the shot from behind the tree,
The shaven head and the painted face,

The silent foot in the wood,

In a land of a strange, outlandish tongue
That was hard to be understood.

220

It fell about the gloaming

The general stood with his staff,
He stood and he looked east and west

With little mind to laugh.

"Far have I been and much have I seen, And kent both gain and loss,

230

But here we have woods on every hand

And a kittle water to cross.

Far have I been and much have I seen,

But never the beat of this;

And there's one must go down to that waterside

To see how deep it is."

It fell in the dusk of the night
When unco things betide,
The skilly captain, the Cameron,
Went down to that waterside.

240

250

260

Canny and soft the captain went;
And a man of the woody land,
With the shaven head and the painted face,
Went down at his right hand.

It fell in the quiet night,

There was never a sound to ken;

But all of the woods to the right and the left
Lay filled with the painted men.

"Far have I been and much have I seen,
Both as a man and boy,

But never have I set forth a foot
On so perilous an employ."

It fell in the dusk of the night
When unco things betide,
That he was aware of a captain-man

Drew near to the waterside.

He was aware of his coming
Down in the gloaming alone;
And he looked in the face of the man
And lo! the face was his own.

"This is my weird," he said,
"And now I ken the worst;
For many shall fall the morn,

But I shall fall with the first.
O, you of the outland tongue,
You of the painted face,

This is the place of my death;

Can you tell me the name of the place ?*

TICONDEROGA

"Since the Frenchmen have been here

They have called it Sault-Marie;
But that is a name for priests,
And not for you and me.
It went by another word,"
Quoth he of the shaven head:
"It was called Ticonderoga

In the days of the great dead."

And it fell on the morrow's morning,

In the fiercest of the fight, That the Cameron bit the dust

270

As he foretold at night;

280

And far from the hills of heather,
Far from the isles of the sea,

He sleeps in the place of the name
As it was doomed to be.

NOTES TO TICONDEROGA

INTRODUCTION. I first heard this legend of my own country from that friend of men of letters, Mr. Alfred Nutt, "there in roaring London's central stream"; and since the ballad first saw the light of day in Scribner's Magazine, Mr. Nutt and Lord Archibald Campbell have been in public controversy on the facts. Two clans, the Camerons and the Campbells, lay claim to this bracing story; and they do well: the man who preferred his plighted troth to the commands and menaces of the dead is an ancestor worth disputing. But the Campbells must rest content: they have the broad lands and the broad page of history; this appanage must be denied them; for between the name of Cameron and that of Campbell, the muse will never hesitate.

Note 1, verse 67. Mr. Nutt reminds me it was "by my sword and Ben Cruachan " the Cameron swore.

Note 2, verse 159. Pitt.

"A periwig'd lord of London." The first

Note 3, verse 204. Cathay." There must be some omission in General Stewart's charming "History of the Highland Regiments," a book that might well be republished and continued; or it scarce appears how our friend could have got to China.