they were in
millions as we thought--every one brighter than another, when by chance
we happened to fix on any individual among them, that we might look
through its face into its heart. All above gloriously glittering, all
below a blank. Our body here, our spirit there--how mean our birthplace,
our death-home how magnificent! "Fear God and keep his commandments,"
said a small still voice--and we felt that if He gave us strength to
obey that law, we should live for ever beyond all those stars.

But were there no Lochs in our parish? Yea. Four. The Little Loch--the
White Loch--the Black Loch--and the Brother Loch. Not a tree on the
banks of any one of them--yet he had been a blockhead who called them
bare. Had there been any need for trees, Nature would have sown them on
hills she so dearly loved. Nor sheep nor cattle were ever heard to
complain of those pastures. They bleated and they lowed as cheerily as
the moorland birdies sang--and how cheerily that was nobody knew who had
not often met the morning on the brae, and shaken hands with her the
rosy-fingered like two familiar friends. No want of lown places there,
in which the creatures could lie with wool or hair unruffled among
surrounding storms. For the hills had been dropt from the hollow of His
hand who "tempers the wind to the shorn lamb"--and even high up, where
you might see tempest-stricken stones--some of them like pillars--but
placed not there by human art--there were cosy bields in wildest
weather, and some into which the snow was never known to drift, green
all the winter through--perennial nests. Such was the nature of the
region where lay our Four Lochs. They were some quarter of a mile--some
half mile--and some whole mile--not more--asunder; but there was no
great height--and we have a hundred times climbed the highest--from
which they could be all seen at once--so cannily were they embosomed, so
needed not to be embowered.

The LITTLE LOCH was the rushiest and reediest little rascal that ever
rustled, and he was on the very edge of the Moor. That he had fish we
all persisted in believing, in spite of all the successless angling of
all kinds that from time immemorial had assailed his sullen depths;--but
what a place for pow-heads! One continued bank of them--while yet they
were but eyes in the spawn--encircled it instead of water-lilies; and at
"the season of the year," by throwing in a few stones, you awoke a
croaking that would have silenced a rooker