crowned with sour mists. Surely in them the sun never peeps even in the
long days of summer: the star, I'll warrant, never rains on them his
calm influence!

Dolour left us speechless as we trudged, even when for a time we were
lost We essayed in a silence at openings here and there, at hacks and
water-currents, wandering off from each other, whistling and calling,
peering from rock-brows or spying into wounds upon the hills, so that
when we reached Dalness it was well on in the day. If in summer weather
the night crawls slowly on the Highlands, the winter brings a fast black
rider indeed. His hoofs were drumming on the hills when first we saw
sight of Dalness; he was over and beyond us when we reached the plain.
The land of Lorn was black dark to the very roots of its trees, and
the rivers and burns themselves got lost in the thick of it, and went
through the night calling from hollow to hollow to hearten each other
till the dawn.

Dalness lies in Glen Etive, at a gusset of hills on either side of which
lie paths known to the drover and the adventurer. The house receded from
the passes and lay back in a plcasance walled by whin or granite, having
a wattled gate at the entrance. When we were descending the pass we
could see a glare of light come from the place even though the mist
shrouded, and by the time we got to the gate h was apparent that the
house was lit in every chamber. The windows that pierced the tall gables
threw beams of light into the darkness, and the open door poured out
a yellow flood. At the time we came on it first we were unaware of our
propinquity to it, and this mansion looming on us suddenly through the
vapours teemed a cantrip of witchcraft, a dwelling's ghost, grey, eerie,
full of frights, a phantom of the mind rather than a habitable home. We
paused in a dumb astonishment to look at it lying there in the darkness,
a thing so different from the barren hills and black bothies behind us.

We gathered in a cluster near the wattle gate, the minister perhaps the
only man who had the wit to acknowledge the reality of the vision.
His eyes fairly gloated on this evidence of civilised state, so much
recalling the surroundings in which he was most at home. As by an
instinct of decency, he drew up his slack hose and bound them anew with
the rushen garters, and pulled his coat-lapels straight upon his chest,
and set his dripping peruke upon his head with a touch of the dandy's
air, all the time with his