number of their doors are, to my Highland instinct, so many
unnecessary entrances for enemies and things mischancy.

But to wander over the house of Dalness, lit from tol-booth to
garret with lowe--to see the fires, not green but at their prime with
high-banked peat that as yet had not thrown an ash--to see so fine a
supper waiting in a mansion utterly desolate and its doors open to the
wilds, seemed a thing so magical that I felt like taking my feet from
the place in a hurry of hurries and fleeing with my comrades from so
unco a countryside. High and low I ranged in the interior. I had found
a nut without a kernel, and at last I stood dumfoundered and afraid,
struck solemn by the echo of my own hail as it rang unfamiliar through
the interior.

I might have been there fifteen minutes or half an hour when M'Iver,
impatient at my delay or fearing some injury to my person, came in and
joined me. He too was struck with amazement at the desertion of the
house.

He measured the candles, he scrutinised the fires, he went round the
building out and in and he could but conclude that we must be close upon
the gate when the house was abandoned.

"But why abandon it?" I asked.

"That's the Skyeman's puzzle; it would take seven men and seven years to
answer it," said he. "I can only say it's very good of them (if there's
no ambuscade in it) to leave so fine an inn and so bonny a supper with
a bush above the door and never a bar against entrance. We'll just take
advantage of what fortune has sent us."

"The sooner the better," said I, standing up to a fire that delighted
my body like a caress. "I have a trick of knowing when good fortune's
a dream, and i'll be awake and find myself lying on hard heather before
the bite's at my mouth."

M'Iver ran out and brought in our companions, none of them unwilling to
put this strange free hostel to the test for its warmth and hospitality.
We shut and barred the doors, and set ourselves down to such a cold
collation as the most fortunate of us had not tasted since the little
wars began. Between the savage and the gentleman is but a good night's
lodging. Give the savage a peaceful hearth to sit by, a roof to his
head, and a copious well-cooked supper, and his savagery will surrender
itself to the sleek content of a Dutch merchantman. We sat at a table
whose load would have rationed a company of twice our number, and I
could see the hard look of hunting relax in the aspect of us all: the