I watched a dove-grey cloud roll gently from the face of the loch and, driven by some vagrant wind, wander ghost-like over the hill-side. The moor-fowl were beginning to wake and I heard the cry of the cock-grouse challenge the morn. Pushing my way through the dew-laden beds of heather, I ascended to the crest of the slope which ran up from the loch, and looked across the country. Before me rolled a panorama of moor and hill, while in the far distance the morning sky bent down to touch the earth. There was no human habitation in sight; no feather of peat-smoke ascending into the air from a shepherd’s cot; no sheep or cattle or living thing; but the silence was broken by the wail of the whaups, which, in that immensity of space, seemed charged with woe. I descended from the hill-top and passed round the end of the loch to reconnoitre from the ridge on the other side. My eyes were met by a like expanse of moor and hills. Here, surely, I thought, is solitude and safety. Here might any fugitive conceal himself till the fever of the hue and cry should abate. For a time at least I should make this peaceful mountain fastness my home. When I came down from the ridge I walked along the edge of the loch till I came upon a little stream which broke merrily away from the loch-side and rippled with tinkling chatter under the heather and across the moorland till the brown ribbon of its course was lost in the distance. Half-dreaming I walked along its bank. Suddenly in a little pool I saw a trout dart to the cover of a stone. With the zest of boyhood, but the wariness of maturer years, I groped with cautious fingers beneath the stone and in a few seconds felt the slight movements of the little fish as my hands closed slowly upon it. In a flash it was out on the bank--yards away, and soon other four lay beside it. I had found an unexpected means of replenishing my larder. With flint and steel and tinder I speedily lit a handful of dry grass placed under the shelter of a boulder, and adding some broken stems of old heather and bits of withered bracken I soon made a pleasant fire over which I cooked my trout on a flat stone. I have eaten few breakfasts so grateful since. The meal over, I took care to extinguish the fire. Then, in better cheer than I had yet been since the moment of my desertion, looking about for a resting-place I found a great granite boulder projecting from the hill-side and underneath its free edge a space where a man might lie comfortably and well hidden by the tall bracken which over-arched the opening. Laying a thick bed of heather beneath the rock, I crawled in, drawing back the brackens to their natural positions over a hiding-place wonderfully snug and safe.