obscure,
to the sound of something groaning and yelling, sometimes
inarticulately, as if it came from something instrumental, and then
mixed up with a wild gibberish, as if shrieking, somehow or other, from
living lips, human and brute--for a dream of yowling dogs is over
all--utterly confounds us as we strive to muster in recollection the few
last hours that have passed tumultuously through our brain--and then a
wide black moor, sometimes covered with day, sometimes with night,
stretches around us, hemmed in on all sides by the tops of mountains
seeming to reel in the sky. Frequent flashes of fire, and a whirring as
of the wings of birds--but sound and sight alike uncertain--break again
upon our dream. Let us not mince the matter--we can afford the
confession--we have been overtaken by liquor--sadly intoxicated--out
with it at once! Frown not, fairest of all sweet--for we lay our
calamity, not to the charge of the Glenlivet circling in countless
quaichs, but at the door of that inveterate enemy to sobriety--the Fresh
Air.

But now we are as sober as a judge. Pity our misfortune--rather than
forgive our sin. We entered that Still in a State of innocence before
the Fall. Where we fell, we know not--in divers ways and sundry
places--between that magic cell on the breast of Benachochie, and this
glade in Gleno. But

"There are worse things in life than a fall among heather."

Surefoot, we suppose, kept himself tolerably sober--and O'Bronte, at
each successive cloit, must have assisted us to remount--for Hamish,
from his style of sleeping, must have been as bad as his master; and,
after all, it is wonderful to think how we got here--over hags and
mosses, and marshes, and quagmires, like those in which "armies whole
have sunk." But the truth is, that never in the whole course of our
lives--and that course has been a strange one--did we ever so often as
once lose our way. Set us down blindfolded on Zahara, and we will beat
the caravan to Timbuctoo. Something or other mysteriously indicative of
the right direction touches the soles of our feet in the shape of the
ground they tread; and even when our souls have gone soaring far away,
or have sunk within us, still have our feet pursued the shortest and the
safest path that leads to the bourne of our pilgrimage. Is not that
strange? But not stranger surely than the flight of the bee, on his
first voyage over the coves of the wilderness to the far-off
heather-bells--or of