We crossed the river without slacking rein, for the water scarce reached above our horses’ pasterns. And now we struck up a burn called the Badlieu, at the foot of which was a herd’s shieling. The spirit of the spring seemed to have clean possessed Marjory and I had never seen her so gay. All her past sorrows and present difficulties seemed forgotten, and a mad gaiety held her captive. She, who was for usual so demure, now cast her gravity to the winds, and seemed bent on taking all the joys of the fair morning. She laughed, she sang snatches of old songs, and she leaped her horse lightly over the moss-trenches. She stooped to pluck some early white wind-flowers, and set some in her hair and some at her saddle-bow. "Nay, John," she cried, "if you and I must take to the hills let us do it with some gallantry. It is glorious to be abroad. I would give twelve months of sleepy peace at Dawyck for one hour of this life. I think this must be the Garden of Perpetual Youth in the fairy tale." The same mad carelessness took hold on me also. Of a sudden my outlook on the world changed round to the opposite, and the black forebodings which had been ever present to distress me, seemed to vanish like dew before the sun. Soon I was riding as gaily as she; while Nicol, as he ran with great strides and unfaltering breath, he too became light-hearted, though to tell the truth care was not a commodity often found with him. Soon we had climbed the low range which separates the Clyde glen from the Tweed and turned down the narrow ravine of the burn which I think they call Fopperbeck, and which flows into the Evan Water. Now it would have been both easier and quieter to have ridden down the broad, low glen of the Medlock Water, which flows into Clyde by the village of Crawford. But this would have brought us perilously near the soldiers at Abington, and if once the pursuit had begun every mile of distance would be worth to us much gold. Yet though the danger was so real I could not think of it as any matter for sorrow, but awaited what fate God might send with a serene composure, begotten partly of my habitual rashness and partly of the intoxication of the morn. We kept over the rocky ravine through which the little river Evan flows to Annan, and came to the wide moorlands which stretch about the upper streams of Clyde. Here we had a great prospect of landscape, and far as eye could see no living being but ourselves moved in these desolate wastes. Far down, just at the mouth of the glen where the vale widens somewhat, rose curling smoke from the hamlet of Elvanfoot, a place soon to be much resorted to and briskly busy, since, forbye lying on the highway ’twixt Edinburgh and Dumfries, it is there that the by-path goes off leading to the famous lead mines, at the two places of Leadhills and Wanlockhead. But now it was but a miserable roadside clachan of some few low huts, with fodder for neither man nor beast.