into the composition, and
show, in still more glaring colours, your absurdity in supposing
yourself to be in solitude. The "Silent People" are around you at every
step. You may not see them--for they are dressed in invisible green; but
they see you, and that unaccountable whispering and buzzing sound one
often hears in what we call the wilderness, what is it, or what can it
be, but the fairies making merry at your expense, pointing out to each
other the extreme silliness of your meditative countenance, and laughing
like to split at your fond conceit of being alone among a multitude of
creatures far wiser than yourself.

But should all this fail to convince you that you are never less alone
than when you think yourself alone, and that a man never knows what it
is to be in the very heart of life till he leaves London, and takes a
walk in Glen-Etive--suppose yourself to have been leaning with your back
against that knoll, dreaming of the far-off race of men, when all at
once the support gives way inwards, and you tumble head over heels in
among a snug coterie of kilted Celts, in the very act of creating
Glenlivet in a great warlock's caldron, seething to the top with the
Spirit of Life!

Such fancies as these, among many others, were with us in the Still. But
a glimmering and a humming and a dizzy bewilderment hangs over that time
and place, finally dying away into oblivion. Here are we sitting in a
glade of a birch-wood in what must be Gleno--some miles from the Still.
Hamish asleep, as usual, whenever he lies down, and all the dogs
yowffing in dreams, and Surefoot standing with his long beard above
ours, almost the same in longitude. We have been more, we suspect, than
half-seas over, and are now lying on the shore of sobriety, almost a
wreck. The truth is, that the new spirit is even more dangerous than the
new light. Both at first dazzle, then obfuscate, and lastly darken into
temporary death. There is, we fear, but one word of one syllable in the
English language that could fully express our late condition. Let our
readers solve the enigma. Oh! those quaichs! By

"What drugs, what spells,
What conjurations, and what mighty magic"

was Christopher overthrown! A strange confusion of sexes, as of men in
petticoats and women in breeches--gowns transmogrified into
jackets--caps into bonnets--and thick naked hairy legs into slim ankles
decent in hose--all somewhere whirling and dancing by, dim and