to some better sanctuary. In the meantime she was safe, and the
boy was the blessedest boy in creation.

These things done, they were just in the humour to have a lark with
Betty. So they unbolted the door, rang the bell, and when Betty
appeared, red-faced and wrathful, asked her very gravely and politely
whether they were not going to have some dinner before they went back to
school: they had now but twenty minutes left. Betty was so dumfoundered
with their impudence that she could not say a word. She did make haste
with the dinner, though, and revealed her indignation only in her
manner of putting the things on the table. As the boys left her, Robert
contented himself with the single hint:

'Betty, Bodyfauld 's i' the perris o' Kettledrum. Min' ye that.'

Betty glowered and said nothing.

But the delight of the walk of three miles over hill and dale and moor
and farm to Mr. Lammie's! The boys, if not as wild as colts--that is,
as wild as most boys would have been--were only the more deeply excited.
That first summer walk, with a goal before them, in all the freshness of
the perfecting year, was something which to remember in after days
was to Falconer nothing short of ecstasy. The westering sun threw long
shadows before them as they trudged away eastward, lightly laden with
the books needful for the morrow's lessons. Once beyond the immediate
purlieus of the town and the various plots of land occupied by its
inhabitants, they crossed a small river, and entered upon a region of
little hills, some covered to the top with trees, chiefly larch, others
cultivated, and some bearing only heather, now nursing in secret its
purple flame for the outburst of the autumn. The road wound between, now
swampy and worn into deep ruts, now sandy and broken with large stones.
Down to its edge would come the dwarfed oak, or the mountain ash, or
the silver birch, single and small, but lovely and fresh; and now green
fields, fenced with walls of earth as green as themselves, or of stones
overgrown with moss, would stretch away on both sides, sprinkled with
busily-feeding cattle. Now they would pass through a farm-steading,
perfumed with the breath of cows, and the odour of burning peat--so
fragrant! though not yet so grateful to the inner sense as it would be
when encountered in after years and in foreign lands. For the smell of
burning and the smell of earth are the deepest underlying sensuous bonds
of the earth's unity, and the common