"Opposite Glenhead, at the uppermost end of the Trod valley, you can see when the sun is setting over western Loch Moar and his rays run level as an ocean floor, the trace of walled enclosures, the outer rings of farm-steadings, the dyke-ridges that enclosed the _Homecrofts_, small as pocket-handkerchiefs; and higher still, ascending the mountainside, regular as the stripes on corduroy, you can trace the ancient rigs where the corn once bloomed bonny even in these wildest and most remote recesses of the hills. All is now passed away and matter for romance--but it is truth all the same, and one may tell it without fear and without favour. "From the Crae Hill, especially if one continues a little to the south till you reach the summit cairn above the farmhouse of Nether Crae you can see many things. For one thing you are in the heart of the Covenant Country. "He pointed north to where on Auchencloy Moor the slender shaft of the Martyrs' Monument gleamed white among the darker heather--south to where on Kirkconnel hillside Grier of Lag found six living men and left six corpses--west towards Wigton Bay, where the tide drowned two of the bravest of womankind, tied like dogs to a stake--east to the kirkyards of Balmaghie and Cross-michael, where under the trees the martyrs of Scotland lie thick as gowans on the lea." "Save by general direction you cannot take in all these by the seeing of the eye from the Crae Hill. But you are in the midst of them, and the hollows of the hills where the men died for their 'thocht,' and the quiet God's Acres where they lie buried, are as much of the essence of Scotland as the red flushing of the heather in autumn and the hill tarns and 'Dhu Lochs' scattered like dark liquid eyes over the face of the wilds." Well may England, as she looked over the battlefields of Belgium, and mourned the thousands and tens of thousands of her brave men whose lives have paid the forfeit for her heedlessness, and listened to the bombardment of her North Sea coast towns by German battleships, and scanned the sky watching for the coming of the aërial invasion her people so much feared, have reflected on the pathos of those lines so often quoted: "Of all sad things of tongue or pen, The saddest are these, it might have been." _Shall we learn by their experience, or shall we follow in England's footsteps and have the same sort of an awakening?_