despair! The hymns she sings at midnight are hymns to the Virgin; but all her songs are songs about love, and chivalry, and knights that went crusading to the Holy Land. He who brought her from another sanctuary into the one now before us, has been dead many years. He perished in shipwreck--and 'tis thought that she sits there gazing down into the loch, as on the place where he sank or was buried; for when told that he was drowned, she shrieked, and made the sign of the cross--and since that long-ago day that stone has in all weathers been her constant seat. Away we go westwards--like fire-worshippers devoutly gazing on the setting sun. And another isle seems to shoot across our path, separated suddenly, as if by magic, from the mainland. How beautiful, with its many crescents, the low-lying shores, carrying here and there a single tree quite into the water, and with verdant shallows guarding the lonely seclusion even from the keel of canoe! Round and round we row, but not a single landing-place. Shall we take each of us a fair burthen in his arms, and bear it to that knoll, whispering and quivering through the twilight with a few birches whose stems glitter like silver pillars in the shade? No--let us not disturb the silent people, now donning their green array for nightly revelries. It is the "Isle of Fairies," and on that knoll hath the fishermen often seen their Queen sitting on a throne, surrounded by myriads of creatures no taller than harebells; one splash of the oar--and all is vanished. There, it is said, lives among the Folk of Peace, the fair child, who, many years ago, disappeared from her parents' shieling at Inversnayde, and whom they vainly wept over as dead. One evening she had floated away by herself in a small boat--while her parents heard, without fear, the clank--duller and duller--of the oars, no longer visible in the distant moonshine. In an hour the returning vessel touched the beech--but no child was to be seen--and they listened in vain for the music of the happy creature's songs. For weeks the loch rolled and roared like the sea--nor was the body found anywhere lying on the shore. Long, long afterwards, some little white bones were interred in Christian burial, for the parents believed them to be the remains of their child--all that had been left by the bill of the raven. But not so thought many dwellers along the mountain-shores--for had not her very voice been often heard by the shepherds, when the unseen flight of Fairies sailed singing along up the solitary Glenfalloch, away over the moors of Tynedrum, and down to the sweet Dalmally, where the shadow of Cruachan darkens the old ruins of melancholy Kilchurn. The lost child's parents died in their old age--but she, 'tis said, is unchanged in shape and features--the same fair thing she was the evening that she disappeared, only a shade of sadness is on her pale face, as if she were pining for the sound of human voices, and the gleam of the peat-fire of the shieling.