"Well minded!" I cried. "You know the cairn on the backside of Caerdon just above the rising of Kilbucho Burn. This day three weeks I will leave a letter for your mistress beneath the stones, which you must fetch and give her. And if I am safe and well every three weeks it will be the same. Good day to you, Nicol, and see you look well to the charge I have committed to you." "Guid day to you, sir," he said, and I protest that the honest fellow had tears in his eyes; and when I had gone on maybe half a mile and looked back, he was still standing like a stone in the same spot. At first I was somewhat depressed in my mind. It is a hard thing thus to part from one’s mistress when the air is thick with perils to both. So as I tramped through the meadows and leaped the brooks, it was with a sad heart, and my whole mind was taken up in conjuring back the pleasant hours I had spent in my lady’s company, the old frolics in the wood of Dawyck, the beginnings of our love-making, even the ride hither from the Cor Water. Yesterday, I reflected, she was with me here; now I am alone and like to be so for long. Then I fell to cursing myself for a fool, and went on my way with a better heart. But it was not till I had crossed the wide stream of the Douglas Water and begun to ascend the hills, that I wholly recovered my composure. Before, I had been straggling in low meadows which do not suit my temper, since I am above all things hill-bred and a lover of dark mountains. So now on the crisp spring grass of the slopes my spirits rose. Was not I young and strong and skilled in the accomplishments of a man? The world was before me—that wide, undiscovered world which had always attracted the more heroic spirits. What hardship was there to live a free life among the hills, under the sunshine and the wind, the clouds and the blue sky? But my delight could never be unmixed though I tried. After all, was I free? I felt of a sudden that I was not one half equipped for a gipsy, adventurous life. I was tied down to custom and place with too many ties. I came of a line of landed gentlemen. The taint of possession, of mastery and lordship over men and land, was strong in me. I could not bring me to think of myself as a kinless and kithless vagabond, having no sure place of abode. Then my love of letters, my learning, my philosophy, bound me down with indissoluble bands. To have acquired a taste for such things was to have unfitted myself for ever for the life of careless vagabondage. Above all there was my love; and ever, as I went on, my thoughts came home from their aërial flights and settled more and more in a little room in a house in a very little portion of God’s universe. And more and more I felt myself a slave to beloved tyrants, and yet would not have been free if I could.