vellers' illusion--the content that's always to
come. In those hours, too, the owls seemed to surrender the fir-woods
and come to the junipers about the back-doors, for they keened in the
darkness, even on, woeful warders of the night, telling the constant
hours.

Twas in these bitter nights, shivering under blanket and plaid, I
thought ruefully of foreign parts, of the frequented towns I had seen
elsewhere, the cleanly paven streets, swept of snow, the sea-coal fires,
and the lanterns swinging over the crowded causeways, signs of friendly
interest and companionship. Here were we, poor peasants, in a waste of
frost and hills, cut off from the merry folks sitting by fire and flame
at ease! Even our gossiping, our _ceilidh_ in each other's houses, was
stopped; except in the castle itself no more the song and story, the
pipe and trump.

In the morning when one ventured abroad he found the deer-slot dimpling
all the snow on the street, and down at the shore, unafeared of man,
would be solitary hinds, widows and rovers from their clans, sniffing
eagerly over to the Cowal hills. Poor beasts! poor beasts! I've seen
them in their madness take to the ice for it when it was little thicker
than a groat, thinking to reach the oak-woods of Ardchyline. For a time
the bay at the river mouth was full of long-tailed ducks, that at
a whistle almost came to your hand, and there too came flocks of
wild-swan, flying in wedges, trumpeting as they flew. Fierce otters
quarrelled over their eels at the mouth of the Black Burn that flows
underneath the town and out below the Tolbooth to the shore, or made the
gloaming melancholy with their doleful whistle. A roebuck in his winter
jacket of mouse-brown fur died one night at my relative's door, and a
sea-eagle gorged himself so upon the carcass that at morning he could
not flap a wing, and fell a ready victim to a knock from my staff.

The passes to the town were head-high with drifted snow, our warders at
the heads of Aora and Shira could not themselves make out the road, and
the notion of added surety this gave us against Antrim's Irishmen was
the only compensation for the ferocity of nature.

In three days the salt loch, in that still and ardent air, froze like
a fishpond, whereupon the oddest spectacle ever my country-side saw
was his that cared to rise at morning to see it. Stags and hinds in
tremendous herds, black cattle, too, from the hills, trotted boldly over
the ice to the other sid