Now we were in a tract of country mournful beyond my poor description. I know comes in Argile that whisper silken to the winds with juicy grasses, corries where the deer love to prance deep in the cool dew, and the beasts of far-off woods come in bands at their seasons and together rejoice. I have seen the hunter in them and the shepherd too, coarse men in life and occupation, come sudden among the blowing rush and whispering reed, among the bog-flower and the cannoch, unheeding the moor-hen and the cailzie-cock rising, or the stag of ten at pause, while they stood, passionate adventurers in a rapture of the mind, held as it were by the spirit of such places as they lay in a sloeberry bloom of haze, the spirit of old good songs, the baffling surmise of the piper and the bard. To those corries of my native place will be coming in the yellow moon of brock and foumart--the beasts that dote on the autumn eves--the People of Quietness; have I not seen their lanthoms and heard their laughter in the night?--so that they must be blessed corries, so endowed since the days when the gods dwelt in them without tartan and spear in the years of the peace that had no beginning. But the corries of Lorn; black night on them, and the rain rot! They were swamps of despair as we went struggling through them. The knife-keen rushes whipped us at the thigh, the waters bubbled in our shoes. Round us rose the hills grey and bald, sown with boulders and crowned with sour mists. Surely in them the sun never peeps even in the long days of summer: the star, I’ll warrant, never rains on them his calm influence! Dolour left us speechless as we trudged, even when for a time we were lost We essayed in a silence at openings here and there, at hacks and water-currents, wandering off from each other, whistling and calling, peering from rock-brows or spying into wounds upon the hills, so that when we reached Dalness it was well on in the day. If in summer weather the night crawls slowly on the Highlands, the winter brings a fast black rider indeed. His hoofs were drumming on the hills when first we saw sight of Dalness; he was over and beyond us when we reached the plain. The land of Lorn was black dark to the very roots of its trees, and the rivers and burns themselves got lost in the thick of it, and went through the night calling from hollow to hollow to hearten each other till the dawn.