Yet he had an experience, the narration of which by our elders gave him the glory of Rob Roy to our imaginations. He had, in a sublime hour of his life, burst the bonds that make some of us fret in the urging weather of spring, that most of us chafe at in childhood, when the old savage wakes and cries, but grow at last to tolerate and even cherish; and he had taken the world for his pillow—as the Gaelic phrase goes—and short of the vital blood of man had dipped in the early sins. II. Alexander Macaulay was his name; in the common conversation of the people he was known as Alasdair Dhu, or Black Alick, for till he was nearly seventy his hair was like the bramble-berry. Of his forebears in the island everybody knew; they had owned Kincreggan for at least five hundred years, until, in his grandfather’s time, they were proscribed and rendered fugitive, made Children of the Mist, nameless vagabonds frequenting desolate straths, making uneasy beds on hunted moors, their home reft from them more by the quirk of the law than by valour, and the walls of it grown with nettle and fern on the verge of the forest of Kilree. Himself he had been brought up far apart from the scenes of his cateran family, in a decent humdrum fashion in the Low County, where he had studied the law, and whence he had come to his native isle a writer. Silent, they said of him—silent and dour, except in congenial company, when his laugh was as ready as any one’s, and his sense of a joke singularly shrewd. Just a plain, douce, decent lawyer body, given pedantically to the quotation of Latin maxims affecting his profession; married, as I have said, to a Lowland wife; his business comfortable, bringing him much about the Islands in boats and gigs. He was “doer”—which is to say, man of business, or agent—for several of the most notable families in the shire in his later years; but at the time I speak of he was factor for Kilree alone. When I have added that he was forty years of age when he had his odd relapse, could sing a fine bass to the Psalmody on a Sabbath, was great for books, and thought no hour of the day so happy as when he could get into his slippers and his feet on the fender, and drink a dish of tea—a beverage for which he had a passion many men have for wine—I have summed up all that was apparent to his neighbours in the character of Alexander Macaulay. And yet they left out a great part of the real Macaulay in their estimate of the factor of Kilree. It happened on a dirty wet day in the month of May that Kilree the Captain himself was on the island, and came to Macaulay’s office to consult regarding some improvements—as he esteemed them—that he had for long contemplated on the inland side of his estate. He was in the Army, a good and gallant soul, young and sentimental, with what is even now common enough in the Highlands and Islands, a great regard for old romantics.