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Updated: May 15, 2025
The Herd-boy was very much delighted over his stroke of good fortune, and, hiding the magic loaf in his bag, he hurried off to the nearest village to buy himself something to eat, and then returned to his sheep. Now the Lord whose sheep the Herd-boy looked after had a very lovely daughter, who always smiled and nodded to the youth when she walked with her father in his fields.
He took a bit of parchment which had once been written upon and had been scraped clean enough to use again, and made some queer marks upon it with his pen dipped in black fluid. That was the first time Padraig had ever seen any one write. It did not take long for Brother Basil to find out how fascinated the herd-boy was with the work of the scriptorium.
"Through the deep woods, at peep of day, The careless herd-boy wends his way, By piny ridge and forest stream, To summon home his roving team Cobos! cobos! from distant dell Shy echo wafts the cattle-bell. "A blithe reply he whistles back, And follows out the devious track, O'er fallen tree and mossy stone A path to all, save him, unknown.
Brother Basil's heart was content, not only because of the gold, but because his most promising pupil, the wild herd-boy from the mountains, had not really been weary of the work, but had proved his love for it and for his master. The most excited person who heard of the discovery Padraig had made was Simon the clerk.
Flora Macdonald rode on to Portree by another road, leaving her servant, Neil MacKechan, and a little herd-boy to act as guides to the Prince. In the meantime, Donald Roy had been active in the Prince's service. At Portree he had met young Rona MacLeod of Rasay and his brother Murdoch, and, as he had expected, found them eager to face any danger or difficulty for their Prince.
A short distance from his couch, stood a little army of ricks, between twenty and thirty of them, constructed perfectly smooth and upright and round and large, each with its conical top netted in with straw-rope, and finished off with what the herd-boy called a toupican a neatly tied and trim tuft of the straw with which it was thatched, answering to the stone-ball on the top of a gable.
It fixes the time for making the hay, and the day for commencing the ploughing of the fallow field; it decrees what measures shall be employed against those who do not punctually pay their taxes; it decides whether a new member shall be admitted into the Commune, and whether an old member shall be allowed to change his domicile; it gives or withholds permission to erect new buildings on the Communal land; it prepares and signs all contracts which the Commune makes with one of its own members or with a stranger; it interferes whenever it thinks necessary in the domestic affairs of its members; it elects the Elder as well as the Communal tax-collector and watchman, where such offices exist and the Communal herd-boy; above all, it divides and allots the Communal land among the members as it thinks fit.
So Billy went up and knocked, and the old gentleman came to the door. "Are you wanting a boy?" says Billy. "I am wanting a herd-boy," says the gentleman, "to take my six cows, six horses, six donkeys, and six goats to pasture every morning, and bring them back at night. Maybe you'd do." "What are the wages?" says Billy.
But Geordie seemed convinced that through this dog-eared volume lay the only royal road to learning. He had already opened the book at one of the little lessons near the end which he seemed to think he had not sufficiently mastered in the "schoolin' days" already far away in the distance to the little herd-boy.
Once, stopping hard by a hamlet, I had sat down to munch such food as I carried, and was sharing my meal with a little brown herd-boy, who told me that he was dinnerless. A few sheep and lean kine plucked at such scant grasses as grew among rocks, and herbs useless but sweet-scented, when suddenly a horn was blown from the tower of the little church.
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