n, and his catch lay on the
bent beside him. He was to sleep the night in his plaid, and already a
fire of heather-roots behind him was prepared for supper. He had been
for a swim, and his hair was still wet on his forehead. Just across a
conical hill rose into the golden air, the highest hill in all the
countryside, but here but a little thing, for the loch was as high as
many a hill-top. Just on its face was a scaur, and there a raven--a
speck--was wheeling slowly. Among the little islands broods of mallard
were swimming, and trout in a bay were splashing with wide circles. The
whole place had seemed caught up into an ecstasy, a riot of gold and
crimson and far-off haunting shades and scents and voices. And yet it
was no wild spectacle; it was the delicate comfort of it all which had
charmed him. Life seemed one glorious holiday, the world a garden of
the gods. There was his home across the hills, with its cool chambers,
its books and pictures, its gardens and memories. There were his
friends up and down the earth. There was the earth itself waiting for
his conquest. And, meantime, there was this airy land around him, his
own by the earliest form of occupation.

The fire died down to embers and a sudden scattering of ashes woke him
out of his dreaming. The old Scots land was many thousand miles away.
His past was wiped out behind him. He was alone in a very strange
place, cut off by a great gulf from youth and home and pleasure. For an
instant the extreme loneliness of an exile's death smote him, but the
next second he comforted himself. The heritage of his land and his
people was his in this ultimate moment a hundredfold more than ever.
The sounding tale of his people's wars--one against a host, a foray in
the mist, a last stand among the mountain snows--sang in his heart like
a tune. The fierce, northern exultation, which glories in hardships and
the forlorn, came upon him with such keenness and delight that, as he
looked into the night and the black unknown, he felt the joy of a
greater kinship. He was kin to men lordlier than himself, the
true-hearted who had ridden the King's path and trampled a little world
under foot. To the old fighters in the Border wars, the religionists of
the South, the Highland gentlemen of the Cause, he cried greeting over
the abyss of time. He had lost no inch of his inheritance. Where,
indeed, was the true Scotland? Not in the little barren acres he had
left, the few thousands of city-