luncheon in a coppice of young firs, or on his thoughts which had
returned to the idyllic. I take up the narrative at about three
o'clock in the afternoon, when he is revealed seated on a milestone
examining his map. For he had come, all unwitting, to a turning of the
ways, and his choice is the cause of this veracious history.

The place was high up on a bare moor, which showed a white lodge among
pines, a white cottage in a green nook by a burnside, and no other
marks of human dwelling. To his left, which was the east, the heather
rose to a low ridge of hill, much scarred with peat-bogs, behind which
appeared the blue shoulder of a considerable mountain. Before him the
road was lost momentarily in the woods of a shooting-box, but
reappeared at a great distance climbing a swell of upland which seemed
to be the glacis of a jumble of bold summits. There was a pass there,
the map told him, which led into Galloway. It was the road he had
meant to follow, but as he sat on the milestone his purpose wavered.
For there seemed greater attractions in the country which lay to the
westward. Mr. McCunn, be it remembered, was not in search of brown
heath and shaggy wood; he wanted greenery and the Spring.

Westward there ran out a peninsula in the shape of an isosceles
triangle, of which his present high-road was the base. At a distance
of a mile or so a railway ran parallel to the road, and he could see
the smoke of a goods train waiting at a tiny station islanded in acres
of bog. Thence the moor swept down to meadows and scattered copses,
above which hung a thin haze of smoke which betokened a village.
Beyond it were further woodlands, not firs but old shady trees, and as
they narrowed to a point the gleam of two tiny estuaries appeared on
either side. He could not see the final cape, but he saw the sea
beyond it, flawed with catspaws, gold in the afternoon sun, and on it a
small herring smack flopping listless sails.

Something in the view caught and held his fancy. He conned his map,
and made out the names. The peninsula was called the Cruives--an old
name apparently, for it was in antique lettering. He vaguely
remembered that "cruives" had something to do with fishing, doubtless
in the two streams which flanked it. One he had already crossed, the
Laver, a clear tumbling water springing from green hills; the other,
the Garple, descended from the rougher mountains to the south. The
hidden village bore the name o