themselves resolutely in a narrow defile through
which their countrymen must pass to evade a second slaughter by
the victors. As the Scots came on the three patriots opposed their
passage, crying shame upon them for cowards and no men, and exhorting
them thus: "Why! would ye rather be certainly killed by the
heathen Danes than die in arms for your own land?" Ashamed, and
yet encouraged, the fugitives rallied, and with the three dauntless
peasants at their head fell upon their astonished pursuers, and fought
with such desperation that they turned defeat into victory. Kenneth
III., the Scottish king, instantly sent for the saviors of his army,
gave them a large share of the enemy's spoils, and made them march in
triumph into Perth with their bloody plough-yokes on their shoulders.
More than that, he ennobled them, and gave them a fair tract of land,
to be measured, according to the fashion of that day, by the flight of
a falcon. From the name of this land the Hays came to be called;
lords of Erroll, and it is said that the Hawk Stone at St. Madoes,
Perthshire, which stands upon what is known to have been the ancient
boundary of the possessions of the Hays, is the identical stone from
which the lucky falcon started. It was left standing as a special
memorial of the defeat of the Danes at Loncarty. Another stone famous
in the Hay annals, and conspicuously placed in front of the entrance
to Slains Castle, is said to be the same on which the peasant general
rested after his toilsome leadership in the battle.

Our walks over the bleak moors on one side, with the heather in
bloom and the blackberries in low--lying purple clusters fringing the
granite rocks, were sometimes rendered more interesting, though more
dangerous, by the sudden falling of a thick white mist. Slowly it
would come at first, gathering little filmy clouds together as it
were, and hovering over the gray sea in curling tufts, and then,
growing strong and dense, would swoop down irresistibly, till what was
clear five minutes before was impenetrably walled off, and one seemed
to stand alone in a silent world of ghosts. Or again, our walks would
take us on the other side, over the Sands of Forvie, a desolate tract
where nothing grows save the coarse grass called _bent_ by the Scotch,
and where the wearied eye rests on nothing but mounds of shifting
sand, drearily shaped into the semblance of graves by the keen winds
that blow from over the German Ocean.

This m