But Kirsteen avoided Jeanie and the rabbits and suddenly remembered something she had to get at the “merchant’s,” which was a full mile off--worsted for her mother’s knitting and needles for herself, who was always, to the reprobation of the elder members of the family, losing her needles. She was glad to represent to herself that this errand was a necessity, for a house without needles how can that be? and poor mother would be more dependent than ever on everything being right for her work, on this melancholy day. It was still quite early, about nine o’clock, and it was with a compunction that Kirsteen gave herself the indulgence of this walk. A morning away from work seemed to her almost an outrage upon life, only to be excused by the circumstances and the necessity of the errand. She walked along the familiar road not noting where she went, her thoughts far away, following the travellers, her mind full of an agitation which was scarcely sorrowful, a sort of exaltation over all that was common and ordinary. The air and the motion were good for her, they were in harmony with that condition of suppressed excitement in which from the depths of her being everything seemed bubbling up. Kirsteen’s soul was like one of the clear pools of the river by which she walked, into which some clear, silvery, living thing had leaped and lived. Henceforward it was no more silent, no longer without motion. The air displaced came up in shining globules to the surface, dimpling over the water, a stir was in it from time to time, a flash, a shimmering of all the ripples. Her mind, her heart were like the pool--no longer mirroring the sky above and the pathway ferns and grasses on the edge, but something that had an independent life. She roamed along without being able to tell, had any one asked her, where she was. The road was a beautiful road by the side of a mountain stream, which was only called the burn, but which was big enough for trout or even now and then salmon--which ran now along the side of the bill, now diving deep down into a ravine, now half hid with big overreaching banks, now flinging forth upon a bit of open country, flowing deep among the rocks, chattering over the shallows, sometimes bass sometimes treble, an unaccountable, unreasonable, changeable stream. Red rowan-tree berries hung over it reflecting their colour in the water. The heather on the hill came in deep russet tones of glory defeated, and the withered bracken with tints of gold, all gaining a double brilliancy from the liquid medium that returned their image. To all these things Kirsteen was so well accustomed that perhaps she did not at any time stop to note them as a stranger might have done. But to-day she did not know what was about her; she was walking in more beautiful landscapes, in the land of imagination, by the river of love, in the country of the heart. The _pays du tendre_ which was ridiculous when all the fine