s we approached the Grey Lady (a curious rock
very near the summit) somebody proposed three cheers for the Queen.

How the children hurrahed,--for the infant heart is easily
inflamed,--and how their shrill Jubilee slogan pierced the mystery of
the night, and went rolling on from glen to glen to the Firth of Forth
itself! Then there was a shout from the rocketmen far out on the open
moor,--'Cawda's clear! Cawda's clear!' Back against a silver sky stood
the signal pile, and signal rockets flashed upward, to be answered from
all the surrounding hills.

Now to light our own fire. One of the village committee solemnly took
off his hat and poured on oil. The great moment had come. Brenda Macrae
approached the sacred pile, and, tremulous from the effect of much
contradictory advice, applied the torch. Silence, thou Grieve and
others, false prophets of disaster! Who now could say that Pettybaw
bonfire had been badly built, or that its fifteen tons of coal and
twenty cords of wood had been unphilosophically heaped together?

The flames rushed toward the sky with ruddy blaze, shining with weird
effect against the black fir-trees and the blacker night. Three cheers
more! God save the Queen! May she reign over us, happy and glorious! And
we cheered lustily, too, you may be sure! It was more for the woman
than the monarch; it was for the blameless life, not for the splendid
monarchy; but there was everything hearty, and nothing alien in our
tone, when we sang 'God save the Queen' with the rest of the Pettybaw
villagers.

The land darkened; the wind blew chill. Willie, Mr. Macdonald, and Mr.
Anstruther brought rugs, and found a sheltered nook for us where we
might still watch the scene. There we sat, looking at the plains below,
with all the village streets sparkling with light, with rockets shooting
into the air and falling to earth in golden rain, with red lights
flickering on the grey lakes, and with one beacon-fire after another
gleaming from the hilltops, till we could count more than fifty
answering one another from the wooded crests along the shore, some
of them piercing the rifts of low-lying clouds till they seemed to be
burning in mid-heaven.

Then one by one the distant fires faded, and as some of us still sat
there silently, far, far away in the grey east there was a faint flush
of carmine where the new dawn was kindling in secret. Underneath
that violet bank of cloud the sun was forging his beams of light. The
pole