not go without him; and unable to control
her impatience, she gave him the slip, and set off with Jim, who was
only too eager for the frolic, on her mountain climbing expedition.

Flora was a native of a rich pastoral country; very beautiful in running
brooks, smooth meadows, and majestic parks; where the fat sleek cattle
so celebrated in the London markets, graze knee-deep in luxuriant
pastures, and the fallow deer browse and gambol beneath the shadow of
majestic oaks through the long bright summer days. She had never seen a
mountain before her visit to the North, in her life; had never risen
higher in the world than to the top of Shooter's Hill; and when they
arrived at the foot of this grand upheaving of nature, she began to
think the task more formidable than she had imagined at a distance. Her
young conductor, agile as a kid, bounded up the steep acclivity with as
much ease as if he was running over a bowling-green.

"Not so fast, Jim!" cried Flora, pausing to draw breath. "I cannot climb
like you."

Jim was already beyond hearing, and was lying on the ground peering over
a projecting crag at least two hundred feet above her head, and impishly
laughing at the slow progress she made.

"Now Jim! that's cruel of you, to desert me in my hour of need," said
Flora, shaking her hand at the young mad-cap. "Lyndsay was right after
all. I had better have waited till to-morrow."

Meanwhile, the path that wound round the mountain towards the summit
became narrower and narrower, and the ascent more steep and difficult.
Flora sat down upon a stone amid the ruins of the chapel to rest, and to
enjoy the magnificent prospect. The contemplation of this sublime
panorama for a while absorbed every other feeling. She was only alive to
a keen sense of the beautiful; and while her eye rested on the lofty
ranges of mountains to the north and south, or upon the broad bosom of
the silver Forth, she no longer wondered at the enthusiastic admiration
expressed by the bards of Scotland for their romantic land.

While absorbed in thought, and contrasting the present with the past, a
lovely boy of four years of age, in kilt and hose, his golden curls
flying in the wind, ran at full speed up the steep side of the hill; a
panting woman, without bonnet or shawl, following hard upon his track,
shaking her fist at him, and vociferating her commands (doubtless for
him to return) in Gaelic, fled by.

On ran the laughing child, the mother after h