ce of what they were
in the old days when the galleys sailed over. No galleys now. No white
birds calling eagerly in the storm. No stiver bead of spray. Only in its
season the cannoch tuft, and that itself but sparsely; the very bluebell
shuns a track so desolate, the sturdy gall itself finds no nourishment
here.

The grey day crept above the land; I watched it from my hillock, and
I shrunk in my clothing that seemed so poor a shielding in a land so
chill. A cold clammy dawn, that never cleared even as it aged, but held
a hint of mist to come that should have warned me of the danger I faced
in venturing on the untravelled surface of the moor, even upon its safer
verge. But it seemed so simple a thing to keep low to the left and down
on Glenurchy that I thought little of the risk, if I reflected upon it
at all.

Some of the stupidity of my venturing out on the surface of Rannoch that
day must have been due to my bodily state. I was not all there, as
the saying goes. I was suffering mind and body from the strain of my
adventures, and most of all from the stormy thrashings of the few days
before--the long journey, the want of reasonable sleep and food. There
had come over all my spirit a kind of dwam, so that at times my head
seemed as if it were stuffed with wool; what mattered was of no account,
even if it were a tinker's death in the sheuch. No words will describe
the feeling except to such as themselves have known it; it is the
condition of the man dead with care and weariness so far as the body is
concerned, and his spirit, sorry to part company, goes lugging his flesh
about the highways.

I was well out on Rannoch before the day was full awake on the country,
walking at great trouble upon the coarse barren soil, among rotten
bog-grass, lichened stones, and fir-roots that thrust from the black
peatlike skeletons of antiquity. And then I came on a cluster of
lochs--grey, cold, vagrant lochs--still to some degree in the thrall of
frost Here's one who has ever a fancy for such lochans, that are lost
and sobbing, sobbing, even-on among the hills, where the reeds and the
rushes hiss in the wind, and the fowls with sheeny feather make night
and day cheery with their call But not those lochs of Rannoch, those
black basins crumbling at the edge of a rotten soil. I skirted them as
far off as I could, as though they were the lochans of a nightmare that
drag the traveller to their kelpie tenants' arms. There were no birds
am