s presented more
difficulties to the imagination than others, I was thinking of your
marriage and mine, and that, I knew from the first moment I saw you,
would be extremely difficult to arrange!"

XXVI

"And soon a score of fires, I ween,
From height, and hill, and cliff, were seen;

Each after each they glanced to sight,
As stars arise upon the night.
They gleamed on many a dusky tarn,
Haunted by the lonely earn;
On many a cairn's grey pyramid,
Where urns of mighty chiefs lie hid."

_The Lay of the Last Minstrel_.

The rain continued at intervals throughout the day, but as the
afternoon wore on the skies looked a trifle more hopeful. It would be
"saft," no doubt, climbing the Law, but the bonfire must be lighted.
Would Pettybaw be behind London? Would Pettybaw desert the Queen in
her hour of need? Not though the rain were bursting the well-heads on
Cawda; not though the swollen mountain burns drowned us to the knee!
So off we started as the short midsummer night descended.

We were to climb the Law, wait for the signal from Cawda's lonely
height, and then fire Pettybaw's torch of loyalty to the little lady
in black; not a blaze flaming out war and rumors of war, as was the
beacon-fire on the old gray battlements of Edinburgh Castle in the
days of yore, but a message of peace and good will. Pausing at a hut
on the side of the great green mountain, we looked north toward Helva,
white-crested with a wreath of vapor. (You need not look on your map
of Scotland for Cawda and Helva, for you will not find them any more
than you will find Pettybaw and Inchcaldy.) One by one the tops of the
distant hills began to clear, and with the glass we could discern the
bonfire cairns upbuilt here and there for Scotland's evening sacrifice
of love and fealty. Cawda was still veiled, and Cawda was to give the
signal for all the smaller fires. Pettybaw's, I suppose, was counted
as a flash in the pan, but not one of the hundred patriots climbing
the mountain side would have acknowledged it; to us the good name of
the kingdom of Fife and the glory of the British Empire depended on
Pettybaw fire. Some of us had misgivings, too,--misgivings founded
upon Miss Grieve's dismal prophecies. She had agreed to put nine
lighted candles in each of our cottage windows at ten o'clock, but had
declined to go out of her kitchen to see a procession, hear a band, or
look at a bonfire. She had ha