Produced by Matthew Wheaton, Beginners Projects, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) A WITCH OF THE HILLS BY FLORENCE WARDEN AUTHOR OF 'THE HOUSE ON THE MARSH,' ETC. IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I LONDON RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen 1888 A WITCH OF THE HILLS CHAPTER I Poor little witch! I think she left all her spells and love-philters behind her, when she let herself be carried off from Ballater to Bayswater, a spot where no sorcery more poetical or more interesting than modern Spiritualism finds a congenial home. What was her star about not to teach her that human hearts can beat as passionately up among the quiet hills and the dark fir-forests as down amid the rattle and the roar of the town? Well, well; it is only in the grave that we make no mistakes; and life and love, God knows, are mysteries beyond the ken of a chuckle-headed country gentleman, with just sense enough to handle a gun and land a salmon. And the sum and substance of all this is that the Deeside hills are very bleak in December, that the north wind sighs and sobs, whistles and howls among the ragged firs and the bending larches in a manner fearsome and eerie to a lonely man at his silent fireside, and that books are but sorry substitutes for human companions when the deer are safe in their winter retreat in the forests, and the grouse-moors are white with snow. So here's for another pine-log on the fire, and a glance back at the fourteen years which have slipped away since I shut the gates of the world behind me. The world! The old leaven is still there then, that after fourteen years of voluntary--almost voluntary--exile, I still call that narrow circle of a few hundreds of not particularly wise, not particularly interesting people--the world! They were wise enough and interesting enough for me at three and twenty, though, when by the death of my elder brother I leapt at once from an irksome struggle, with expensive tastes, on a stingy allowance of three hundred a year, to the full enjoyment of an income of eight thousand.