g season was
on. The night hung thick with stars, but there was no moon; a stiff wind
from the east prinked at my right ear and cooled my horse's skin, as he
slowed down after a canter of a mile or two on this side of Pennymore.
Out on the loch I could see the lights of a few herring-boats lift and
fall at the end of their trail of nets.

"Too few of you there for the town to be busy and cheerful," said I to
myself; "no doubt the bulk of the boats are down at Otter, damming the
fish in the narrow gut, and keeping them from searching up to our own
good townsmen."

I pressed my brute to a trot, and turned round into the nether part of
the town. It was what I expected--the place was dark, black out. The
people were sleeping; the salt air of Loch Finne went sighing through
the place in a way that made me dowie for old days. We went over the
causeway-stones with a clatter that might have wakened the dead, but no
one put a head out, and I thought of the notion of a cheery home-coming
poor Gavin had--my dear cousin, stroked out and cold under foreign clods
at Velshiem, two leagues below the field of Worms of Hessen, on the
banks of the Rhine, in Low Germanie.

It is a curious business this riding into a town in the dark waste of
night; curious even in a strange town when all are the same for you that
sleep behind those shutters and those doors, but doubly curious when you
know that behind the dark fronts are folk lying that you know well, that
have been thinking, and drinking, and thriving when you were far
away. As I went clattering slowly by, I would say at one house front,
"Yonder's my old comrade, Tearlach, who taught me my one tune on the
pipe-chanter; is his beard grown yet, I wonder?" At another, "There
is the garret window of the schoolmaster's daughter--does she sing so
sweetly nowadays in the old kirk?"

In the dead middle of the street I pulled my horse up, just to study the
full quietness of the hour. Leaning over, I put a hand on his nostrils
and whispered in his ear for a silence, as we do abroad in ambuscade.
Town Innera-ora slept sound, sure enough! All to hear was the spilling
of the river at the cascade under the bridge and the plopping of the
waves against the wall we call the ramparts, that keeps the sea from
thrashing on the Tolbooth. And then over all I could hear a most strange
moaning sound, such as we boys used to make with a piece of lath nicked
at the edges and swung hurriedly round the head by a