byre and ran her hand over the tors of the beasts, crooning away to
herself; and another month saw the last of the kye pic calved.

"Well, well, I stood when she came to me, and she smirked at me.
'Seven braw beasts, and not a lame yin among them,' says she, and
tittered a wee bit laugh that set the dogs girning through their bare
teeth; and then she went her way, and her laughing coming back to me,
and we would not be far on when the first of the beasts was hirpling;
and one after the other the lameness came on them, till I could just
have sat down and grat that I had not set the dogs on the witch.

"I would just be turning the beasts on the road for a wee, when there
came the wee Broon Lass among the bracken on the hillside, and then I
left the road and took the dogs with me, and we hid on the low side,
for fear to anger the wee Broon Lass. She went among the beasts, and
they would be kenning her, and lowing quietly like calves, and she
would be lifting their feet, and then there would be a hole in the
clits o' them a'. And the wee Broon Lass, she blew and she blew into
the hole, and went on to the next, and in a wee the beasts were walking
sound, and taking a bite at the sprits and the scrog on the roadside,
and I lay close till I saw the wee one near the rise o' the hill, and
started the beasts again, and the lameness came near them not any more,
but aye I would be carrying the steel after that."

In the middle of the glen we left Sandy Nicol with his dogs and his
travelling beasts, and before we turned the bend where the nut-trees
were I looked back, and there he came on slowly with the sunset light
on him as he came, and I saw him looking to the great rocks on his left
hand as though he waited the coming of something not of this world; and
again he would be looking down through the bare trees to the dark glen
where the burn was muttering and grumbling coldly, and it was strange
to me that these wild men, so terrible in their anger, would be
believing all these old stories, until the thought came to me that it
would just be the poetry and imaginings of the Celt, alone among the
hills that are aye on the very point of speaking to their children; for
a man, and a bold man, will be seeing and hearing strange things among
the hills, when the mist comes down, when he will have listened to the
stories of hate and love and clan feuds of his folks since he could be
listening, clapped on his creepie stool close to his mo