ange of
feature. The gloaming bad darkened, and the little small-paned window
was a fretted sheet of dark and lucent blue. Grateful odours of food
and drink and tobacco hung in the air, though tar and homespun and the
far-carried fragrance of peat fought stoutly for the mastery.

One man fell to telling of a fox-hunt, when he lay on the hill for the
night and shot five of the destroyers of his flock before the morning,
it was the sign--and the hour--for stories of many kinds--tales of
weather and adventure, humorous lowland escapades and dismal mountain
realities. Or stranger still, there would come the odd, half-believed
legends of the glen, told shamefully yet with the realism of men for
whom each word had a power and meaning far above fiction. Lewis
listened entranced, marking his interest now by an exclamation, and
again by a question.

The herd of Farawa told of the salmon, the king of the Aller salmon, who
swam to the head of Aller and then crossed the spit of land to the head
of Callowa to meet the king of the Callowa fish. It was a humorous
story, and was capped there and then by his cousin of the Dreichill, who
told a ghastly tale of a murder in the wilds. Then a lonely man, Simon
o' the Heid o' the Hope, glorified his powers on a January night when he
swung himself on a flood-gate over the Aller while the thing quivered
beneath him, and the water roared redly above his thighs.

"And that yett broke when I was three pairts ower, and I went down the
river with my feet tangled in the bars and nae room for sweemin'. But I
gripped an oak-ritt and stelled mysel' for an hour till the water
knockit the yett to sawdust. It broke baith my ankles, and though I'm a
mortal strong man in my arms, thae twisted kitts keepit me helpless.
When a man's feet are broke he has nae strength in his wrist."

"I know," said Lewis, with excitement. "I have found the same myself."

"Where?" asked the man, without rudeness.

"Once on the Skifso when I was after salmon, and once in the Doorab
hills above Abjela."

"Were ye sick when they rescued ye? I was. I had twae muscles sprung
on my arm, but that was naething to the retching and dizziness when they
laid me on the heather. Jock Jeffrey was bending ower me, and though he
wasna touching me I began to suffocate, and yet I was ower weak to cry
out and had to thole it."

"I know. If you hang up in the void for a little and get the feeling of
great space burned on your mind, you nea