here, sir, wud ye? An' if ye 'ill gang wi' me efter dinner, 'a 'll be
prood to shoo ye the hoose."

So, after a good dinner with the English fishermen, Sandy piloted me
down the road through the thickening dusk. I remember a hoodie crow
flew close behind us with a choking, ghostly cough that startled me. The
Macpherson cottage was a snug little house of stone, with fuchsias and
roses growing in the front yard: and the widow was a douce old lady,
with a face like a winter apple in the month of April, wrinkled, but
still rosy. She was a little doubtful about entertaining strangers, but
when she heard I was from America she opened the doors of her house and
her heart. And when, by a subtle cross examination that would have been
a credit to the wife of a Connecticut deacon, she discovered the fact
that her lodger was a minister, she did two things, with equal and
immediate fervour; she brought out the big Bible and asked him to
conduct evening worship, and she produced a bottle of old Glenlivet
and begged him to "guard against takkin' cauld by takkin' a glass of
speerits."

It was a very pleasant fortnight at Melvich. Mistress Macpherson was so
motherly that "takkin' cauld" was reduced to a permanent impossibility.
The other men at the inn proved to be very companionable fellows, quite
different from the monsters of insolence that my anger had imagined
in the moment of disappointment. The shooting party kept the table
abundantly supplied with grouse and hares and highland venison; and
there was a piper to march up and down before the window and play while
we ate dinner--a very complimentary and disquieting performance. But
there are many occasions in life when pride can be entertained only at
the expense of comfort.

Of course Sandy was my gillie. It was a fine sight to see him exhibiting
the tiny American trout-rod, tied with silk ribbons in its delicate
case, to the other gillies and exulting over them. Every morning he
would lead me away through the heather to some lonely loch on the
shoulders of the hills, from which we could look down upon the Northern
Sea and the blue Orkney Isles far away across the Pentland Firth.
Sometimes we would find a loch with a boat on it, and drift up and
down, casting along the shores. Sometimes, in spite of Sandy's confident
predictions, no boat could be found, and then I must put on the
Mackintosh trousers and wade out over my hips into the water, and
circumambulate the pond, throwin