he running water into a hundred shapes. Some are dressed in
mosses, yellow and green, like velvet to the touch, and all covered with
drops of moisture; some are gaunt and naked and deplorable, with sharp
edges and dry faces. The burn avoids some with a cunning and almost
coquettish grace, dashes brutally against others, as if impelled by an
internal violence of emotion. Others, again, it caresses quite gently,
and would be glad to linger by, if Nature would allow the dalliance. And
this army of rocks helps to give to the burn its charm of infinite
variety, and to fill its voice with a whole gamut of expression; for the
differing shape of each boulder, against which it rushes in its long
career, gives it a different note. It flickers across the small and
round stone with the purling cry of a child. From the stone curved
inwards, and with a hollow bosom it gains a crooning, liquid melody. The
pointed and narrow colony of rocks which break it into an intricate
network of small water threads, toss it, chattering frivolously, towards
the dark pool under the birches, where the trout play like sinister
shadows and the insects dance in the sombre pomp of Autumn; and when it
gains a great slab that serves it for a spring-board, from which it
takes a mighty leap, its voice is loud and defiant, and shrieks with a
banshee of triumph--in which, too, there is surely an undercurrent of
wailing woe. Oh, the burn has many voices among the rocks, under the
ferns and the birch trees, in the brooding darkness of the mists and
shadows, between the steep walls of the green banks that hem it in! Many
voices which can sing, when they choose, one song, again and again
and--monotonously--again!

So--now on this sad Autumn day--I was with the burn in its hiding-place,
cool, damp, fretful. Carlounie sank from my sight. My garden, the wilder
land beyond, the moors on which yesterday my incompetence as a shot had
roused the contempt of my cousin and of my hirelings--all were lost to
view. I was away from all men in this narrow, tree-shrouded cleft of a
world. I sat down on a rock, and, stretching out my legs, rested my
heels on another rock. Beneath my legs the clear brown water glided
swiftly. I sat and listened to its murmur. And, just then, it did not
occur to me that water can utter words like men. The murmur was
suggestive but definitely inarticulate. I had come down here to be away
and to think. The murmur of my mind spoke to the murmur of the