I halted for a little in the grateful shade of a spreading lime, feasting my eyes on scenery dear and familiar to me since boyhood--the little round wood at the Cundy foot, every tree in which I had climbed in quest of young squirrels; the clump of geans at Holmhill, whose wild purple-brown fruit was sweeter far than any coddled garden cherries; the sweep of the Nith at the Ellers, where I had so often 'dooked' and fished; and the mossy, wild-thyme carpeted 'howmes'--our playground of long ago. The murmuring Nith recalled to me the Auld Gillfit, with its gray-blue pebbled beach and its banks of upstanding raspberry-bushes and twisting, prickly brambles, and with extraordinary intensity the desire sprang up within me to view its charms once more. Buoyed up by pleasurable anticipations, forgetful of my weakness and the uneven, rutted slope, I opened the little wicket, and, without misgiving, entered the wood. Through the green, quivering foliage I caught glimpses here and there of rippling, dancing wavelets, nodding brown-headed segg grasses, and patches of shimmering, sunlit sands. With eyes strained to catch each well-known feature, I stumblingly descended the rugged bank, and very soon, more by luck than careful guidance, I reached my goal. A hedge of waving willows screened from me the Cundy stream; but its joyous rhythmic ripple, as it washed its sandy, pebbled bed, sounded in my ear like the crooning song my mother used to sing when I lay on her knee as a child. This was the dear old spot, the bank where we lay after our 'dook,' baking our naked bodies in the sun's warm rays; here the little sandy isle where we played at pirates and castaways, cooking a guddled yellow trout over a 'smeeky' green-wood fire, and washing it down with lukewarm water from the stream; there, through the arches' span, the Doctor's Tarn, where the grayling used to lie; and, away beyond, the quiet grassy uplands of the Keir and the gray-green hills of Glencairn fading into the horizon. Seating myself on the sun-browned turf, I lit my pipe. How long I sat I cannot say, for I was lost in reverie, and, truth to tell, just a little fatigued by my unusual exertions. Suddenly, however, it came to me that I wasn't alone. This fact was first proclaimed by a curling wreath of smoke on the other side of the willows. Then the aroma of a well-seasoned havana greeted my nostrils, and I rose to my feet to reconnoitre. Walking a little upstream, I came to an opening in the willow-hedge, and there, on a sand-knoll at the foot of the bank, sat a man--a clergyman, judging by his dress; while a little in front of him, and almost on the water's edge, was a tall young lady standing before an easel. I saw the man in profile--elderly and gray-bearded he was; but the lady's back was turned to me, and she was much engrossed with her canvas.