r house or hauld is on the
road for ten lang Scots miles, and that's worth twenty English. I am
sorry your honour would think o' gaun out o' my house the night. But my
wife's gude-sister is a decent woman, and it's no lost that a friend
gets."

Morton accordingly paid his reckoning and departed. The sunset of the
summer day placed him at the ash-tree, where the path led up towards the
moors.

"Here," he said to himself, "my misfortunes commenced; for just here,
when Burley and I were about to separate on the first night we ever met,
he was alarmed by the intelligence that the passes were secured by
soldiers lying in wait for him. Beneath that very ash sate the old woman
who apprised him of his danger. How strange that my whole fortunes should
have become inseparably interwoven with that man's, without anything more
on my part than the discharge of an ordinary duty of humanity! Would to
Heaven it were possible I could find my humble quiet and tranquillity of
mind upon the spot where I lost them!"

Thus arranging his reflections betwixt speech and thought, he turned his
horse's head up the path.

Evening lowered around him as he advanced up the narrow dell which had
once been a wood, but was now a ravine divested of trees, unless where a
few, from their inaccessible situation on the edge of precipitous banks,
or clinging among rocks and huge stones, defied the invasion of men and
of cattle, like the scattered tribes of a conquered country, driven to
take refuge in the barren strength of its mountains. These too, wasted
and decayed, seemed rather to exist than to flourish, and only served to
indicate what the landscape had once been. But the stream brawled down
among them in all its freshness and vivacity, giving the life and
animation which a mountain rivulet alone can confer on the barest and
most savage scenes, and which the inhabitants of such a country miss when
gazing even upon the tranquil winding of a majestic stream through plains
of fertility, and beside palaces of splendour. The track of the road
followed the course of the brook, which was now visible, and now only to
be distinguished by its brawling heard among the stones or in the clefts
of the rock that occasionally interrupted its course.

"Murmurer that thou art," said Morton, in the enthusiasm of his reverie,
"why chafe with the rocks that stop thy course for a moment? There is a
sea to receive thee in its bosom; and there is an eternity for man when