akes you
hearty. You feel monarch of all you survey, even if it be not worth
having, which is the most stirring feeling a landscape can yield.

Nor would there be much to divide your monarchy; only a chimney,
reeking blue into the grey sky, from a fire of peat, a few sheep, or
some hardly [Transcriber's note: hardy?] cattle turned out in the
height of the day to gather what scraps of food they might, a pair of
wandering red deer at the same hard game of finding a living, or a
hare, grown bluish-white for the winter-time, to resemble the friendly
snow, scampering off before the snap of your foot on the heather. When
the rigour of winter lies upon the land, men and women can do little
but keep their beasts alive, and themselves sit round the fire, passing
the slow time of day with what gossip may be made.

We froze within the old walls of Corgarff Castle, for they were time
and weather worn. Gales had beaten them, snowstorms had driven at
them, and rains had lashed them, until they were corrugated with
furrows and hollows, like the face of an ancient man. It is curious
how age, whether in a face or in a building, takes on the same
milestones of hollow and hillock, to record the march of time and the
dents in a soul.

But come the summer in Corgarff, and the far-flung ranges of hill lose
their white severity and assume the kindlier mantle of sprouting
heather and green grass; the ptarmigan flies back to its heights above
the snow-line, content with the thin picking and the splendid peace
which summer there provides; the red deer no more falls hungrily upon
the lower pastures, with the roaring fight gone out of the stags and
the hinds left bleating to their own company, like so many widowed
women of the wild.

Instead, the thin sheep of the clansmen, each with its owner's brand to
identify it, wander forth to the common grazings, glad that the bloom
of living is on Nature again. That brings a panorama of scenery which
lights the eye and braces the heart and mind, hills which run into
mountains, mountains which run into the skies, all proclaiming the
splendour of God.

Now, I have tried to tell you this, not very well, perhaps, because our
surroundings in life have much to do with our actions, and the two sets
of circumstance must be comprehended together, especially in a sparsely
peopled countryside. You unconsciously take your dispositions from the
atmosphere, and you cannot be certain always where you may eith