to a violent horror of
shaking and hot flushes alternating with deadly cold, so that to bide
night and day in the sole covert of a tree looked like my death.

At last Maisie Lennox, who had a fine discernment for places of
concealment in the old days when we two used to play at
"Bogle-about-the-Stacks" at the Duchrae, cast an eye up at the roof of
the well-house.

"I declare, I think there is a chamber up there," she said, and stood a
moment considering.

"Give me an ease up!" she said quietly to my mother. She did everything
quietly.

"How can there be such a place and I not know it?" said my mother. "Have
I not been about the tower these thirty years?"

But Maisie thought otherwise of the matter, and without more ado she set
her little feet in the nicks of the stones, which were rough-set like
the inside of a chimney.

Then putting her palm flat above her, she pushed an iron-ringed
trap-door open, lifted herself level with it, and so disappeared from
our view. We could hear her groping above us, and sometimes little
stones and lime pellets fell tinkling into the well. So we remained
beneath waiting for her report, and I hoped that it might not be long,
for I felt that soon I must lay me down and die, so terrible was the
tightness about my head.

"There is a chamber here," she cried at last. "It is low in the rigging
and part of the roof is broken towards the trees, but the ivy hides it
and the hole cannot be seen from the house."

"The very place! Well done, young lass!" said my mother--much pleased,
even though she had not found it herself. For she was a remarkable
woman.

Maisie looked over the edge.

"Give me your hand?" she said.

Now there is this curious thing about this lass ever since she was in
short coats, that she not only knew her own mind in every emergency, but
also compelled the minds of every one else. At that moment it seemed as
natural that I should obey her, and also for my mother to assist her, as
if she had been a queen commanding obedience. Yet she hardly ever spoke
above her breath, and always rather as though she were venturing a
suggestion. This is not what any one can ever learn. It is a natural
gift. Now there is my brother Sandy. He has a commanding way with him
certainly. He gets himself obeyed. But at what an expenditure of breath.
You can hear him at the Mains of Barskeoch telling the lass to put on
the porridge pot. And he cannot get his feet wet and be needing a change