The boys were entranced, and it was nearly dark when they left Nancy's cottage and betook themselves to the glen. Kooran was very pleased to see them back, and helped them to fold the sheep; then the whole four-- that is, Kenneth and Archie and Kooran and Shot--went up the fairy glen to the fairy knoll and the smugglers' cave. Kenneth lit the lamp; then he lit a fire out of doors and hung over a pot from a tripod, quite gipsy fashion. Kenneth was a capital cook, and made a rabbit stew that a king might have eaten. So both boys supped royally, and the dogs had the bones. Then the things were cleared away, and down lay Archie on the dais, to listen to Kenneth reading the "Tales of the Borders." On the whole, they had spent a most delightful day of it. But it was only one of many, for Saturday was Kenneth's own day, and Archie was his constant companion. And so the autumn wore away among these, peaceful glens. The days grew shorter and shorter, the frosts fell morning and night, and winds moaned through trees leafless and bare. The sheep were folded now in fields on the lower lands, and Kenneth had more time for his studies. But every evening found Archie and him in their cave in the fairy knoll. CHAPTER SIX. KENNETH. Scene: Glen Alva in a winter garb. A morning in December. A glorious morning and yet how great a change from the day before. For on the west coast of Scotland changes do come soon and sudden. Last night, ere gloaming fell, Kenneth had stood at his mother's cottage door for hours watching the sunset and the weird but splendid after-glow. The sun had gone down rosy red and large behind a grey-blue bank of rock-and-tower clouds that bounded the horizon above the hills. But so strange and beautiful was the colour that soon spread over the firmament, with its tints of lavender, yellow, pink, and pale sea-green, that even Kenneth's mother must hold up her hands and cry,-- "Oh! dear laddie, a sky like that, I fear, bodes no good to the glen." For uppermost in every one's mind in Glen Alva, at the present time, was the threatened eviction. Then, just one hour afterwards, the pink colour had disappeared from the sky, and the yellow had changed to one of the reddest, fieriest orange hues ever eyes had looked upon; while away farther round towards the north the sky was an ocean of darkest green. The trees, ashes and elms, that bordered a field adjoining the kail-yard, stood strangely out against this glow; every branchlet and twig seemed traced in ink--the blackest of the black. Above this orange, or rather through its upper edge, where it went melting into the zenith's blue, the stars glimmered green. But looking earthward, all around the hills and fields were dark and bare, for winter had not yet donned her mantle of snow.