Jobby and Elcy walked in the rear; the former thinking of nothing, but full of what are called animal spirits, skittish as a colt, and unable to continue long at any one thing,—now throwing up a stone and endeavouring to hit it as it descended through the air, to the imminent peril of his mother’s bonnet—then making “ducks and drakes” along the lake with small pieces of the mountain slate—the next moment aiming at some bird as it skimmed across the water—the next, scampering up the hill-side with his sister Elcy’s miserable-looking and most unsportsman-like Italian greyhound at his heels, starting the mountain sheep—and then descending with several sprigs of the “whin” or furze bushes in his hand, and stealthily dropping them into his father’s coat-tail pocket, in the earnest hope of seeing the old gentleman shortly sit down to rest himself by the way on some neighbouring crag. Elcy, with her eyes moist with tears—though she hardly knew why—was too sad to talk, or mind the tricks that her brother played with either her father or her poor little shivering pet dog. It was the first time she had ever left her home; and though her woman’s curiosity made her long to see London, of which she had heard so much, the departure from Hassness was like leaving some dear old friend. The mountains, which for so many years she had seen, flushed with the young light, “first thing” when she opened her eyes in the morning, she had got to know and almost love like living things. She had watched them under every aspect,—with the white snow lying on them, and bringing them so close that they looked like huge icebergs floating towards her—or with the noonday sun lighting up their green sides, and the shapes of the opposite peaks and crags painted in black shadow upon them—or with the million stars shining in the grey sky above their heads, like luminous dust, and their huge dim forms sleeping in the haze of the moonlight, and looking like distant storm-clouds rather than solid masses of rock. Each of the hills round about had its own proper name, and so had assumed a kind of natural personification in Elcy’s mind. Every one, to her fancy, was a different being associated with a different feeling; for some she had the same reverence as for the aged, while some, woman-like, she half loved for the sense of power they impressed her with. And as she journeyed along the banks of the lakes they surrounded, and each fresh turn brought some new mountain form into sight, a dark train of melancholy thoughts swept across her mind like the shadows of clouds flitting along some peaceful meadow, and she trod the path with the sound of an ideal bell droning in her ears.