Over a high bank, slippery with dead leaves and the thawed rime of the past morning, he went, a nasty place to get across, and in doing so he prudently removed the cartridges from his gun, lest he might slip, trip, or stumble to the detriment of himself or some adjacent companion. Pausing at times, he uttered a hallo, but got no response. He could see nothing of the belts of firs before referred to; but he came upon clumps of hazel, nearly destitute of leaves, growing thickly about the roots, and expanding as they rose some nine feet or so above the ground. There was a dense undergrowth of bracken and intertwisted brambles here, a tangle of dead leaves, stems, and thorns, most perplexing to find one's self among in a dense mist. From amid these a rabbit or hare scudded forth; but he took no heed of it. Suddenly a bird--a fine golden pheasant--whirred up, and settled down again in the covert very near him. He remembered the request of Annot. Never had the latter seemed brighter, dearer, or sweeter too, than that morning when she playfully asked him to bring a golden pheasant's wing, and secretly returned his farewell caress with such joy and warmth. Dropping a charge into one of his barrels, he fired, but failed to kill the bird, which, hit somewhere, beat the earth with its wings and rolled or ran forward into the mist. Dropping his gun, Roland darted forward after it--the tendril of a bramble caught his feet, and a gasping cry escaped him as he fell heavily on his face and then downward--he knew not where! Instinctively and desperately he clutched something; it was turf on a rocky edge. He felt it yielding; a small tree, a silver birch, grew near, and wildly he caught a branch thereof; and swung out over some profundity, he knew not what or where, till like a flash of lightning there came upon his memory the Burn Cleugh, a deep, rocky chasm, which had been the mysterious terror of his boyhood--as the fabled shade of a treacherous kelpie, a hairy fiend with red eyes and red claws--a rent or rift in the low hills some miles from his home, and at the bottom of which, about sixty feet and more below, the burn referred to as passing through the Earl's Haugh, and near the hamlet of the same name, flowed towards Eden. 'Save me--God save me!' rose to his lips, and with each respiration as he clung to the branch and the bead-drops started to his forehead, he lived a lifetime--a lifetime as it were of keenest agony.