s to his ancient habitation of the moors.

II

Two years passed, and April came with her suns and rains and again the
waters brimmed full in the valleys. Under the clear, shining sky the
lambing went on, and the faint bleat of sheep brooded on the hills. In
a land of young heather and green upland meads, of faint odours of
moor-burn, and hill-tops falling in clear ridges to the sky-line, the
veriest St. Anthony would not abide indoors; so I flung all else to the
winds and went a-fishing.

At the first pool on the Callowa, where the great flood sweeps nobly
round a ragged shoulder of hill, and spreads into broad deeps beneath a
tangle of birches, I began my toils. The turf was still wet with dew
and the young leaves gleamed in the glow of morning. Far up the stream
rose the grim hills which hem the mosses and tarns of that tableland,
whence flow the greater waters of the countryside. An ineffable
freshness, as of the morning alike of the day and the seasons, filled
the clear hill-air, and the remote peaks gave the needed touch of
intangible romance.

But as I fished I came on a man sitting in a green dell, busy at the
making of brooms. I knew his face and dress, for who could forget such
eclectic raggedness?--and I remembered that day two years before when
he first hobbled into my ken. Now, as I saw him there, I was
captivated by the nameless mystery of his appearance. There was
something startling to one accustomed to the lack-lustre gaze of
town-bred folk, in the sight of an eye as keen and wild as a hawk's
from sheer solitude and lonely travelling. He was so bent and scarred
with weather that he seemed as much a part of that woodland place as
the birks themselves, and the noise of his labours did not startle the
birds that hopped on the branches.

Little by little I won his acquaintance--by a chance reminiscence, a
single tale, the mention of a friend. Then he made me free of his
knowledge, and my fishing fared well that day. He dragged me up little
streams to sequestered pools, where I had astonishing success; and then
back to some great swirl in the Callowa where he had seen monstrous
takes. And all the while he delighted me with his talk, of men and
things, of weather and place, pitched high in his thin, old voice, and
garnished with many tones of lingering sentiment. He spoke in a broad,
slow Scots, with so quaint a lilt in his speech that one seemed to be
in an elder time among people of a