terment, from the others of our
broken band. They might be all at Urchy Bridge by now, on the very
selvedge of freedom, but I was couped by the heels more disastrously
than ever. Down I sat on a tuft of moss, and I felt cast upon the dust
by a most cruel providence.

How long I sat there I cannot tell; it may have been a full hour or
more, it may have been but a pause of some minutes, for I was in a
stupor of bitter disappointment And when I rose again I was the sport of
chance, for whether my way lay before me or lay behind me, or to left
or right, was altogether beyond my decision. It was well on in the day:
high above this stagnant plain among tall bens there must be shining
a friendly and constant sun; but Elrigmore, gentleman and sometime
cavalier of Mackay's Scots, was in the very gullet of night for all he
could see around him. It was folly, I knew; but on somewhere I must be
going, so I took to where my nose led, picking my way with new caution
among the bogs and boulders. The neighbourhood of the lochs was a sort
of guidance in some degree, for their immediate presence gave to a
nostril sharpened by life in the wild a moist and peaty odour fresh from
the corroding banks. I sought them and I found them, and finding them I
found a danger even greater than my loss in that desolate plain. For in
the grey smoke of mist those treacherous pools crept noiselessly to
my feet, and once I had almost walked blindly into an ice-clear turgid
little lake. My foot sank in the mire of it almost up to the knees ere
I jumped to the nature of my neighbourhood, and with an effort little
short of miraculous in the state of my body, threw myself back on the
safe bank, clear of the death-trap.

And again I sat on a hillock and surrendered to the most doleful
meditations. Noon came and went, the rain passed and came again, and
passed once more, and still I was guessing my way about the lochs,
making no headway from their neighbourhood, and, to tell the truth, a
little glad of the same, for they were all I knew of the landscape
in Moor Rannoch, and something of friendship was in their treacherous
presence, and to know they were still beside me, though it said little
for my progress to Glenurchy, was an assurance that I was not making my
position worse by going in the wrong airt.

All about me, when the rain was gone for the last time, there was a cry
of waters, the voices of the burns running into the lochans, tinkling,
tinkling, tin