im; but as well might a
giant pursue a fairy.

Flora followed the path they had taken, and was beginning to enjoy the
keen bracing air of the hills, when she happened to cast her eyes to the
far-off meadows beneath. Her head grew suddenly giddy, and she could not
divest herself of the idea, that one false step would send her to the
plains below. Here was a most ridiculous and unromantic position: she
neither dared to advance nor retreat; and she stood grasping a ledge of
the rocky wall in an agony of cowardice and irresolution. At this
critical moment, the mother of the run-away child returned panting from
the higher ledge of the mountain, and, perceiving Flora pale and
trembling, very kindly stopped and asked what ailed her.

Flora could not help laughing while she confessed her fears, lest she
should fall from the narrow footpath on which she stood. The woman,
though evidently highly amused at her distress, had too much native
kindliness of heart, which is the mother of genuine politeness, to yield
to the merriment which hovered about her lips.

"Ye are na accustomed to the hills," she said, in her northern dialect,
"or ye wa'd na dread a hillock like this. Ye suld ha' been born whar I
wa' born, to ken a mountain fra' a mole-hill. There is my bairn, noo, I
canna' keep him fra' the mountain. He will gang awa' to the tap, an'
only laughs at me when I spier to him to come doon. It's a' because he
is sae weel begotten--an' all his forbears war reared amang the hills."

The good woman sat down upon a piece of the loose rock, and commenced a
long history of herself, of her husband, and of the great clan of
Macdonald (to which they belonged), which at last ended in the
discovery, that her aristocratic spouse was a Corporal in the Highland
regiment then stationed in Edinburgh, and that Flora, his wife, washed
for the officers in the said regiment--that the little Donald, with his
wild-goat propensities, was their only child, and so attached to the
hills, that she could not keep him confined to the meadows below! The
moment her eye was off him, his great delight was to lead her a dance up
the mountain, which, as she never succeeded in catching him, was quite
labour in vain.

All this, and more, the good-natured woman communicated in her frank,
desultory manner, as she led Flora down the steep, narrow path which led
to the meadows below. Her kindness did not end here, for she walked some
way up the road to put Mrs. Lyndsay