a _chapelle ardente_, and a young lady; it is
historical, and of the last generation but one.

Even our frozen strath here has its modern legend, which may be told in
English, and out of which, I am sure, a novelist could make a good short
story, or a pleasant opening chapter of a romance. What is the
mysterious art by which these things are done? What makes the well-told
story seem real, rich with life, actual, engrossing? It is the secret of
genius, of the novelist's art, and the writer who cannot practise the art
might as well try to discover the Philosopher's Stone, or to "harp fish
out of the water." However, let me tell the legend as simply as may be,
and as it was told to me.

The strath runs due north, the river flowing from a great loch to the
Northern sea. All around are low, undulating hills, brown with heather,
and as lonely almost as the Sahara. On the horizon to the south rise the
mountains, Ben this and Ben that, real mountains of beautiful outline,
though no higher than some three thousand feet. Before the country was
divided into moors and forests, tenanted by makers of patent corkscrews,
and boilers of patent soap, before the rivers were distributed into
beats, marked off by white and red posts, there lived over to the south,
under the mountains, a sportsman of athletic frame and adventurous
disposition. His name I have forgotten, but we may call him Dick
Lindsay. It is told of him that he once found a poacher in the forest,
and, being unable to catch the intruder, fired his rifle, not at him, but
in his neighbourhood, whereon the poacher, deliberately kneeling down,
took a long shot at Dick. How the duel ended, and whether either party
flew a flag of truce, history does not record.

At all events, one stormy day in late September, Dick had stalked and
wounded a stag on the hills to the south-east of the strath. Here, if
only one were a novelist, one could weave several pages of valuable copy
out of the stalk. The stag made for the strath here, and Dick, who had
no gillie, but was an independent sportsman of the old school, pursued on
foot. Plunging down the low, birch-clad hills, the stag found the
flooded river before him, black and swollen with rain. He took the
water, crossing by the big pool, which looked almost like a little loch,
tempestuous under a north wind blowing up stream, and covered with small
white, vicious crests. The stag crossed and staggered up the bank, where
he s