beautiful as the one in which you at present are. And while you sit on the bridge in a state of half-sleepy contentment--a bee nuzzling in a bell-shaped flower within reach of your stick, the sea-gulls dancing silent quadrilles overhead, the white lightning flash of a rabbit from copse to copse twenty yards off--you hear a sharp whistle, then a shout, and looking round there is M'Ian himself standing on a height, his figure clear against the sky: and immediately the men tinkering the boat on the shore drop work and stand and stare, and out of the smoke that wraps the cottages rushes bonnetless, Lachlan Dhu, or Donald Roy, scattering a brood of poultry in his haste, and marvelling much what has moved his master to such unwonted exertion. My friend's white house is a solitary one, no other dwelling of the same kind being within eight miles of it. In winter, wind and rain beat it with a special spite; and the thunder of the sea creeps into your sleeping ears, and your dreams are of breakers and reefs, and ships going to pieces, and the cries of drowning men. In summer, it basks as contentedly on its green knoll; green grass, with the daisy wagging its head in the soft wind, runs up to the very door of the porch. But although solitary enough--so solitary; that if you are asked to dine with your nearest neighbour you must mount and ride--there are many more huts about than those we have seen nestling on the shore beneath the smooth green plateau on which sheep are feeding. If you walk along to the west,--and a rough path it is, for your course is over broken boulders,--you come on a little bay with an eagle's nest of a castle perched on a cliff, and there you will find a school-house and a half-a-dozen huts, the blue smoke steaming out of the crannies in the walls and roofs. Dark pyramids of peat are standing about, sheep and cows are feeding on the bits of pasture, gulls are weaving their eternal dances above, and during the day the school-room is murmuring like a beehive--only a much less pleasant task than the making of honey is going on within. [Sidenote: The pensioner.] Behind the house to the east, hidden by the broken ground and the masses of birch-wood, is another collection of huts; and in one of these lives the most interesting man in the place. He is an old pensioner, who has seen service in different quarters of the world; and frequently have I carried him a string of pigtail, and shared his glass of usquebaugh, and heard him, as he sat on a stone in the sunshine, tell tales of barrack life in Jamaica; of woody wildernesses filled with gorgeous undergrowth, of parasites that climbed like fluttering tongues of fire, and of the noisy towns of monkeys and parrots in the upper branches. I have heard him also severely critical on the different varieties of rum. Of every fiery compound he had a catholic appreciation, but rum was his special favourite--being to him what a Greek text was to Person, or an old