The old man, in the belief that we were gipsies, was at first disposed to be angry at the liberty we had taken with his hayrick; but Walter's simple story mollified him at once, and he expressed deep regret that "poor boys, who had met with an accident," should have laid them down in such a night under the open sky, and a house so near. "It was putting disgrace," he said, "on a Christian land." I was assisted into his cottage, whose only other inmate, an aged woman, the old Highlander's wife, received us with great kindness and sympathy; and on Walter's declaring our names and lineage, the hospitable regrets and regards of both host and hostess waxed stronger and louder still. They knew our maternal grandfather and grandmother, and remembered old Donald Roy; and when my cousin named my father, there was a strongly-expressed burst of sorrow and commiseration, that the son of a man whom they had seen so "well to do in the world" should be in circumstances so deplorably destitute. I was too ill to take much note of what passed. I only remember, that of the food which they placed before me, I could partake of only a few spoonfuls of milk; and that the old woman, as she washed my feet, fell a-crying over me. I was, however, so greatly recruited by a night's rest in their best bed, as to be fit in the morning to be removed, in the old man's _rung_-cart, to the house of a relation in the parish of Nigg, from which, after a second day's rest, I was conveyed in another cart to the Cromarty Ferry. And thus terminated the last of my boyish visits to the Highlands.