Read "Heather Ale34" by Robert Louis Stevenson online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
A Galloway Legend / From the bonny bells of heather / They brewed a drink long-syne, / Was sweeter far than honey, / Was stronger far than wine.
They brewed it and they drank it, / And lay in a blessed swound / For days and days together / In their dwellings underground.
There rose a king in Scotland, / A fell man to his foes, / He smote the Picts in battle, / He hunted them like roes.
Over miles of the red mountain / He hunted as they fled, / And strewed the dwarfish bodies / Of the dying and the dead.
Summer came in the country, / Red was the heather bell; / But the manner of the brewing / Was none alive to tell.
In the graves that were like children's / On many a mountain head, / The Brewsters of the Heather / Lay numbered with the dead.
The king in the red moorland / Rode on a summer's day; / And the bees hummed, and the curlews / Cried beside the way.
The king rode, and was angry, / Black was his brow and pale, / To rule in a land of heather / And lack the Heather Ale.
It fortuned that his vassals, / Riding free on the heath, / Came on a stone that was fallen / And vermin hid beneath.
Rudely plucked from their hiding, / Never a word they spoke: / A son and his aged father --
Last of the dwarfish folk.
The king sat high on his charger, / He looked on the little men; / And the dwarfish and swarthy couple / Looked at the king again.
Down by the shore he had them; / And there on the giddy brink --
"I will give you life, ye vermin, / For the secret of the drink."
There stood the son and father; / And they looked high and low; / The heather was red around them, / The sea rumbled below.
And up and spoke the father, / Shrill was his voice to hear: / "I have a word in private, / A word for the royal ear.
"Life is dear to the aged, / And honour a little thing; / I would gladly sell the secret,"
Quoth the Pict to the king.
His voice was small as a sparrow's, / And shrill and wonderful clear; / "I would gladly sell my secret, / Only my son I fear.
"For life is a little matter, / And death is nought to the young; / And I dare not sell my honour / Under the eye of my son.