spirits. We were not hunting,
but shifting our hunting-ground, so all morning we travelled fast to
the north along the rim of the uplands.

At midday it cleared, and the afternoon was a pageant of pure colour.
The wind sank to a low breeze; the sun lit the infinite green spaces,
and kindled the wet forest to a jewelled coronal. Lawson gaspingly
admired it all, as he cantered bareheaded up a bracken-clad slope.
"God's country," he said twenty times. "I've found it." Take a piece
of Sussex downland; put a stream in every hollow and a patch of wood;
and at the edge, where the cliffs at home would fall to the sea, put a
cloak of forest muffling the scarp and dropping thousands of feet to
the blue plains. Take the diamond air of the Gornergrat, and the riot
of colour which you get by a West Highland lochside in late September.
Put flowers everywhere, the things we grow in hothouses, geraniums like
sun-shades and arums like trumpets. That will give you a notion of the
countryside we were in. I began to see that after all it was out of
the common.

And just before sunset we came over a ridge and found something better.
It was a shallow glen, half a mile wide, down which ran a blue-grey
stream in lings like the Spean, till at the edge of the plateau it
leaped into the dim forest in a snowy cascade. The opposite side ran
up in gentle slopes to a rocky knell, from which the eye had a noble
prospect of the plains. All down the glen were little copses, half
moons of green edging some silvery shore of the burn, or delicate
clusters of tall trees nodding on the hill brow. The place so
satisfied the eye that for the sheer wonder of its perfection we
stopped and stared in silence for many minutes.

Then "The House," I said, and Lawson replied softly, "The House!"

We rode slowly into the glen in the mulberry gloaming. Our transport
waggons were half an hour behind, so we had time to explore. Lawson
dismounted and plucked handfuls of flowers from the water meadows. He
was singing to himself all the time--an old French catch about Cadet
Rousselle and his Trois maisons.

"Who owns it?" I asked.

"My firm, as like as not. We have miles of land about here. But
whoever the man is, he has got to sell. Here I build my tabernacle,
old man. Here, and nowhere else!"

In the very centre of the glen, in a loop of the stream, was one copse
which even in that half light struck me as different from the others.
It was of tal