ide with fortune if you expect to win many of her favours.
Like a woman, she sighs to be courted, even if she fears to be
captured. She likes adventures for themselves, and may be good to you
if you give her some. But the man who lets her ride by alone, or with
somebody who has already bridled her, and then goes out in pursuit, has
a long chase before him.

My affair with the Black Colonel was both private and public, and thus,
in a two-fold sense, the right policy was to take the offensive. Yes,
I would tell him bluntly that there could be nothing between us on the
matters he had raised, and that it was war to the dirk, with such an
eventual issue as God might will.

This was my decision, and it seemed to me that, as an officer and a
gentleman, I must intimate it to him at first-hand by invading his
retreat, the Colonel's Bed, over there in Strathdee, near his Inverey.
Singly, and alone, I would seek the Black Colonel in his den,
honourably shake myself clear of his dark overtures, and tell him to
cease his designs.

If I were to read this chronicle as remote from its occurrences as you
may do, I should, probably, toss my head and call that a quixotic
decision, but I have enough pride in being a Gordon, to wish that I may
stand fairly with the future, in small as in great matters. Therefore,
I beg you that you put yourself in my place, bearing in mind the
difficult conditions of the time in the Scottish Highlands.

A man needs a stout heart, a clear head, and a sure hand, to hold his
own in a welter of interests and antagonisms such as beset me. The
eternal instinct in a full man is to get through, to achieve, to live,
aye, and to love, thus making life a great, clamorous thing not a mere
existence. So concluding, I took the first occasion by the hand, with
what personal risk there might be, and made across the rugged bridge of
mountain which both binds and divides the Don and the Dee, to interview
the Black Colonel.

My mood was less heroic by the time I had done the miles of scarped
hill, clinging moor, and lifting wood, with bridle-paths for roads,
which took me to the locality of the Colonel's Bed. Where it was
exactly I did not know, but he had friends around who kept him
informed, and I counted on meeting one of them. Then I could send a
message to him, saying I desired to speak with him privately, and he
would guess the rest.

Things fell out like that, and I was bidden to rest in a Highland
shie