the promontory with a cheerful heart.

I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from
an unmixed lowland stock. But an uncle of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after a
poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had married a young wife in the
islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and when
she died in giving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm, had
remained in his possession. It brought him in nothing but the means of
life, as I was well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had pursued;
he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a fresh
adventure upon life; and remained in Aros, biting his nails at destiny.
Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought neither help
nor contentment. Meantime our family was dying out in the lowlands;
there is little luck for any of that race; and perhaps my father was the
luckiest of all, for not only was he one of the last to die, but he left
a son to his name and a little money to support it. I was a student of
Edinburgh University, living well enough at my own charges, but without
kith or kin; when some news of me found its way to Uncle Gordon on the
Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was a man who held blood thicker than
water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence, and taught me to
count Aros as my home. Thus it was that I came to spend my vacations in
that part of the country, so far from all society and comfort, between
the codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was that now, when I had done
with my classes, I was returning thither with so light a heart that July
day.

The Ross, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide nor high, but as
rough as God made it to this day; the deep sea on either hand of it, full
of rugged isles and reefs most perilous to seamen--all overlooked from
the eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peals of Ben Kyaw.
_The Mountain of the Mist_, they say the words signify in the Gaelic
tongue; and it is well named. For that hill-top, which is more than
three thousand feet in height, catches all the clouds that come blowing
from the seaward; and, indeed, I used often to think that it must make
them for itself; since when all heaven was clear to the sea level, there
would ever be a streamer on Ben Kyaw. It brought water, too, and was
mossy {5} to the top in consequence. I have seen us sitting in broad
sunshine on the Ross, and the rain falling black like crape