retending to doze in the long broad levels of
Kincreggan, so that it may not too soon lose its freedom in so magic
a place. But the glen opens out anon, woods and parks cluster, and the
Duke's gardens and multitudes of roads come into view. The deer stamp
and flee among the grasses, flowers grow in more profusion than up the
glen where no woods shelter. There are trim houses by the wayside, with
men about the doors talking with loud cheerfulness, and laughing in the
way of inn-frequenters. A gateway from solitude, an entrance to a region
where the most startling and varied things were ever happening, to a boy
from the glen this town end of the valley is a sample of Paradise for
beauty and interest. Gilian went through it with his blue eyes blurred
to-day, but for wont he found it full of charms and fancies. To go under
its white-harled archways on a market day was to come upon a new
world, and yet not all a new world, for its spectacles of life and
movement--the busy street, the clanging pavement, the noisy closes, the
quay ever sounding with the high calls of mariners and fishers--seemed
sometimes to strike a chord of memory. At the first experience of this
busy community, the innumerable children playing before the school,
and the women with wide flowing clothes, and flowered bonnets on
their heads, though so different from the children of the glen and its
familiar dames with piped caps, or maids with snooded locks--all was
pleasant to his wondering view. He seemed to know and understand them
at the first glance, deeper even than he knew or understood the common
surroundings of his life in Ladyfield; he felt at times more comfort in
the air of those lanes and closes though unpleasantly they might smell
(if it was the curing season and the gut-pots reeked at the quay) than
in the winds of the place he came from, the winds of the wilds, so
indifferent to mankind, the winds of the woods, sacred to the ghosts,
among whom a boy in a kilt was an intruder, the winds of the hills, that
come blowing from round the universe and on the most peaceful days are
but momentary visitors, stopping but to tap with a branch at the window,
or whistle mockingly in a vent.

In spite of their mockery of him, Gilian always loved the children of
the town. At first when they used to see him come through the arches
walking hurriedly, feeling his feet in unaccustomed shoes awkward and
unmanageable, and the polish of his face a thing unbearable, th