Salute to Adventurers eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 335 pages of information about Salute to Adventurers.

Salute to Adventurers eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 335 pages of information about Salute to Adventurers.

Presently food was ready, and our rude meal in that darkling place was a merry one.  Elspeth sat enthroned on a couch of pine branches—­I can see her yet shielding her face from the blaze with one little hand, and dividing her cakes with the other.  Then we lit our pipes, and fell to the long tales of the camp-fire.  Ringan had a story of a black-haired princess of Spain, and how for love of her two gentlemen did marvels on the seas.  The chief one never returned to claim her, but died in a fight off Cartagena, and wrote a fine ballad about his mistress which Ringan said was still sung in the taverns of the Main.  He gave a verse of it, a wild, sad thing, with tears in it and the joy of battle.  After that we all sang, all but me, who have no voice.  Bertrand had a lay of Normandy, about a lady who walked in the apple-orchards and fell in love with a wandering minstrel; and Donaldson sang a rough ballad of Virginia, in which a man weighs the worth of his wife against a tankard of apple-jack.  Grey sang an English song about the north-country maid who came to London, and a bit of the chanty of the Devon men who sacked Santa Fe and stole the Almirante’s daughter.  As for Elspeth, she sang to a soft Scots tune the tale of the Lady of Cassilis who followed the gipsy’s piping.  In it the gipsy tells of what he can offer the lady, and lo! it was our own case!—­

“And ye shall wear no silken gown,
No maid shall bind your hair;
The yellow broom shall be your gem,
Your braid the heather rare.

“Athwart the moor, adown the hill,
Across the world away! 
The path is long for happy hearts
That sing to greet the day,
My love,
That sing to greet the day.”

I remember, too, the last verse of it:—­

“And at the last no solemn stole
Shall on thy breast be laid;
No mumbling priest shall speed thy soul,
No charnel vault thee shade. 
But by the shadowed hazel copse,
Aneath the greenwood tree,
Where airs are soft and waters sing,
Thou’lt ever sleep by me,
My love,
Thou’lt ever sleep by me.”

Then we fell to talking about the things in the West that no man had yet discovered, and Shalah, to whom our songs were nothing, now lent an ear.

“The first Virginians,” said Grey, “thought that over the hills lay the western ocean and the road to Cathay.  I do not know, but I am confident that but a little way west we should come to water.  A great river or else the ocean.”

Ringan differed.  He held that the land of America was very wide in those parts, as wide as south of the isthmus where no man had yet crossed it.  Then he told us of a sea-captain who had travelled inland in Mexico for five weeks and come to a land where gold was as common as chuckiestones, and a great people dwelt who worshipped a god who lived in a mountain.  And he spoke of the holy city of Manoa, which Sir Walter Raleigh sought, and which many had seen from far hill-tops. 

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Salute to Adventurers from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.