Therefore why disturb the darkness, O most miserable one, by dismal reiteration of a well-known fact? But still the song moans out its Cockney dialect, false notes, and falser sentiment; and the singer, drenched to the skin, possibly starving, with probably only one desire, and that for drink, goes his way. I hear the melancholy music die into the distance. Of a truth his sensations cannot be pleasant; but with these few coppers changed into the equivalent of alcohol perhaps he also may 'Life's leaden metal into gold transmute,' and cheat himself into the belief that life is worth living. That last sentence, now I come to read it over again, seems perhaps a trifle cynical; _seems_, certainly, but are we not told that things often 'are not what they seem'? I have heard the late poet laureate accused (and by a Scotchwoman, too!) of writing slang. 'Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly towards the west.' My thoughts, too, are 'sloping' in a westerly direction. I am on a personally-conducted tour--my brain is in command, and I am the spectator. If only I can forget that those letters have to be answered, and if no other miserable wretch comes to sing touching refrains outside in the rain, my brain and I shall thoroughly enjoy each other's company; whilst the firelight sheds its dim radiance over glimpses of the metamorphised past and the indeterminable future, till all is so blended together that I cannot tell whether these things have been or are to be. I see long stretches of Rannoch moor as Stevenson saw it, 'where the mists rise and die away, and showed us that country lying as waste as the sea; only the moorfowl and the peewees crying upon it, and far over to the east a herd of deer moving like dots. Much of it is red with heather; much of the rest broken up with bogs and hags and peaty pools; some had been burnt black in a heath fire; and in another place there are quite a forest of dead firs, standing like skeletons.' Northward over the moor ponderous Ben Alder lifts his bleak and barren top in massive strength above lonely Loch Ericht, whilst beyond the loch, Schehallion's slender summit, deep blue in the evening sky, tells of that fierce day when the body of the dead Graham lay on the hillside and the sun went down on a lost cause.