showed me how to wrap the plaid around my shoulders, and when I left
that cottage I was the living image of the kind of Scotsman you see in
the illustrations to Burns's poems. But at any rate I was more or less
clad.

It was as well, for the weather changed before midday to a thick
drizzle of rain. I found shelter below an overhanging rock in the
crook of a burn, where a drift of dead brackens made a tolerable bed.
There I managed to sleep till nightfall, waking very cramped and
wretched, with my shoulder gnawing like a toothache. I ate the oatcake
and cheese the old wife had given me and set out again just before the
darkening.

I pass over the miseries of that night among the wet hills. There were
no stars to steer by, and I had to do the best I could from my memory
of the map. Twice I lost my way, and I had some nasty falls into
peat-bogs. I had only about ten miles to go as the crow flies, but my
mistakes made it nearer twenty. The last bit was completed with set
teeth and a very light and dizzy head. But I managed it, and in the
early dawn I was knocking at Mr Turnbull's door. The mist lay close
and thick, and from the cottage I could not see the highroad.

Mr Turnbull himself opened to me--sober and something more than sober.
He was primly dressed in an ancient but well-tended suit of black; he
had been shaved not later than the night before; he wore a linen
collar; and in his left hand he carried a pocket Bible. At first he
did not recognize me.

'Whae are ye that comes stravaigin' here on the Sabbath mornin'?' he
asked.

I had lost all count of the days. So the Sabbath was the reason for
this strange decorum.

My head was swimming so wildly that I could not frame a coherent
answer. But he recognized me, and he saw that I was ill.

'Hae ye got my specs?' he asked.

I fetched them out of my trouser pocket and gave him them.

'Ye'll hae come for your jaicket and westcoat,' he said. 'Come in-bye.
Losh, man, ye're terrible dune i' the legs. Haud up till I get ye to a
chair.'

I perceived I was in for a bout of malaria. I had a good deal of fever
in my bones, and the wet night had brought it out, while my shoulder
and the effects of the fumes combined to make me feel pretty bad.
Before I knew, Mr Turnbull was helping me off with my clothes, and
putting me to bed in one of the two cupboards that lined the kitchen
walls.

He was a true friend in need, that old roadman. His wife was dead
y