ous in the trackless waste. Our map
had proved too clever for us. In the circumstances there was only one
thing to be done. With awful calm we folded the sheet, tore it into
little pieces, and hid them in a rabbit-hole.

For about five miles after that we kept along a promontory that
shouldered its way across an undulating plain, ringed in the distance
by purple hills; then we sighted our distant landmark--a conical
beacon--that we had been steering for. We were descending, thigh-deep
in bracken, when the wind bore down to us from a dot against the
skyline of a ridge the tiniest of thin whistles. A few minutes later a
sheep-dog raced past in the direction of a cluster of white specks.
For a while we watched it, and each lithe, effortless bound, as it
passed upon its quest, struck a responsive chord within us--we who
floundered clumsily among the boulders in our path.

But, for all this momentary exhilaration, it seemed a long time later
that we struck the source of the burn which would in time guide us to
our half-way halting place. To us, who had been nurtured on its broad
bosom,[1] there was something almost pathetic--as in meeting an old
nurse in much reduced circumstances--about this trickle among the peat
and moss. Lower down, however, it widened, and the water poured over
granite boulders, with a bell-like contralto note, into a succession of
amber pools.

There we shed our few garments on the bank, and the moments that
followed, from the first exultant thrill as the water effervesced over
our bodies till we crawled out dripping to dry in the wind and sun,
seemed to hold only gratitude--an immense undefined gratitude to the
Power that held all life. At its heels came hunger, wonderfully well
defined.

Lower down, where the road that stretches like a white ribbon over the
bosom of the moor crosses the river, there is an inn. I will not name
it: writers of poems and guide-books--worthier penmen all--have done
that. Besides, quite enough people go there as it is. We dropped, via
a kine-scented yard and over a seven-foot bank, into the road abreast
the inn door, and here a brake, freighted with tourist folk, brought us
suddenly back to the conventions that everyday life demands.

True, we were never fain to cling to these; but, standing there on the
King's high-road, clad in football knickers and thin jerseys, sun-burnt
and dishevelled, we were conscious of a sudden immense embarrassment.
And, in soot