which went to Colin’s heart, and which he understood perfectly; but perhaps, though no one would have confessed as much, it was a relief to all when the scholar-son, of whom everybody at Ramore was so proud, went off across the loch, rowed by two of his brothers, with his portmanteau and the first evening coat he had ever possessed, to Ardmartin, the fine house on the opposite bank, where he was to be tutor to Mr. Jordan’s boys, and eat among strangers the bread of his own toil. The mistress stood at the door shading her eyes with her hand, and looking after the boat as it shot across the bright water. Never at its height of beauty had the Holy Loch looked more fair. The sun was expanding and exulting over all the hills, searching into every hollow, throwing up unthought-of tints, heaps of moss, and masses of rock, that no one knew of till that moment; and with the sunshine went flying shadows that rose and fell like the lifting of an eyelid. The gleam of the sun before she put up her hand to shade her face fell upon the tear in the mistress’s eye, and hung a rainbow upon the long lash, which was wet with that tender dew. She looked at her boys gliding over the loch through this veil of fairy colours, all made out of a tear, and the heart in her tender bosom beat with a corresponding conjunction of pain and happiness. “He’ll never more come back to bide at home like his father’s son,” she said to herself, softly, with a pang of natural mortification; “but, eh, I’m a thankless woman to complain, and him so weel and so good, and naething in fant but nature,” added the mother, with all the compunction of true love; and so stood gazing till the boat had gone out of hearing, and had begun to enter that sweet shadow of the opposite bank, projected far into the loch, which plunged the whole landscape into a dazzling uncertainty, and made it a doubtful matter which was land and which was water. Colin himself, touched by the loveliness of the scene, had paused just then to look down the shining line to where this beatified paradise of water opened out into the heaven of Clyde. And to his mother’s eyes gazing after him, the boat seemed to hang suspended among the sweet spring foliage of the Lady’s Glen, which lay reflected, every leaf and twig, in the sweeter loch. When somebody called her indoors she went away with a sigh. Was it earth, or a vision of Paradise, or “some unsubstantial fairy place?” The sense of all this loveliness struck intense, with almost a feeling of pain, upon the gentle woman’s poetic heart. And it was in such a scene that Colin wrote the verses which borrowed from the sun and the rain prismatic colours like those of his mother’s tears, and were as near poetry as they could possibly be to miss that glory. Luckily for him he had no favourite confidant at hand to persuade him that he was a poet; so the verse-making did him nothing but good, providing a safety-valve for that somewhat stormy period of his existence.