s, he might well be--that life had gone so ill with him. The
shape of his trousers was in itself a jest, so strangely were they
bagged and ravelled about his knees; and his coat was all bedaubed with
clay as though he had lain in a rain-dub during the New Year's
festivity. I will own I was not sorry to think he had had a merry New
Year, and been young again for an evening; but I was sorry to see the
mark still there. One could not expect such an old gentleman to be much
of a dandy, or a great student of respectability in dress; but there
might have been a wife at home, who had brushed out similar stains after
fifty New Years, now become old, or a round-armed daughter, who would
wish to have him neat, were it only out of self-respect and for the
ploughman sweetheart when he looks round at night. Plainly, there was
nothing of this in his life, and years and loneliness hung heavily on
his old arms. He was seventy-six, he told me; and nobody would give a
day's work to a man that age: they would think he couldn't do it. "And,
'deed," he went on, with a sad little chuckle, "'deed, I doubt if I
could." He said good-bye to me at a foot-path, and crippled wearily off
to his work. It will make your heart ache if you think of his old
fingers groping in the snow.

He told me I was to turn down beside the school-house for Dunure. And
so, when I found a lone house among the snow, and heard a babble of
childish voices from within, I struck off into a steep road leading
downwards to the sea. Dunure lies close under the steep hill: a haven
among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate disrepair, much apparatus
for drying nets, and a score or so of fishers' houses. Hard by, a few
shards of ruined castle overhang the sea, a few vaults, and one tall
gable honeycombed with windows. The snow lay on the beach to the
tide-mark. It was daubed on to the sills of the ruin; it roosted in the
crannies of the rock like white sea-birds; even on outlying reefs there
would be a little cock of snow, like a toy lighthouse. Everything was
grey and white in a cold and dolorous sort of shepherd's plaid. In the
profound silence, broken only by the noise of oars at sea, a horn was
sounded twice; and I saw the postman, girt with two bags, pause a moment
at the end of the clachan for letters. It is, perhaps, characteristic of
Dunure that none were brought him.

The people at the public-house did not seem well pleased to see me, and
though I would fain have staye