f heather, and when I would be
running with a kindling here and there, and watching the lowes lick
into the dry scrog with a hiss before the breeze, I would be thinking
much of Dan and Ronny McKinnon and me in the blazing whins, and the
gangers and excisemen and riff-raff of that kidney hallooing round us.
Belle loved this burning and the very fierceness of the flames, with
the eerie gloaming falling, and she would not be heeding the cries of
Old Betty (for Betty was much with her these days for company) to be
keeping indoors.

"Hamish," she would say, coming close to me in the ruddy light, and the
dark cheeks of her glowing and her eyes flashing--"Hamish, I have that
in the heart of me." And as she stood thus pointing to the fires, all
lit up and wild and beautiful, I thought there must surely have been
away back in her story a priestess who tended fires in some far Eastern
land.

Well, well, it's fine to be thinking back on these far-off days, and
the work we made at the dyke-building round the first park, and how we
gathered the lying stones and rousted out the deeper-set ones; and the
dyker made all grist that came to his mill, for he would split up
considerable boulders with great exactness and skill, a feat that never
came easily to me. Then there were the stone drains to be making, and
the great talking about the run of the water, and the lie of the land,
and the niceness with which we laid those drains! They were all joys
to me. I dreamed green meadows and well-kept dykes and good beasts.

And then the ploughing--a sair job ploughing heather roots--and the
furrows I drew would have brought the laughing to Dan McBride; but the
soil was not so black, but where the rabbits had burrowed there was
good green grass among the red scrapings. The sowing and the harrowing
were the easy job after that, and I mind me how I leaned on that dyke
and gazed on the first three acres won out of the hill, when the green
breard was showing, as a man might gaze on his first-born son. In
these night trakings in the hills I learned the shape of every stunted
bush and tree, and the place of every rock on either hand, and many's
the droll ploy I came into. Ye'll still see the track yet down from
the peat hags like a scar on the hillside, but the stories of the road
are lost in the swirling mists, and carried away in the winter gales.

There was a burn running over the road down from the little loch with
the green rush islands,