Within the long, low cottage the black smoke-polished rafters rose in inky darkness above the rough whitewashed walls, and the mud floor showed the traces of past leaks in many a hill and hollow. The two tiny windows were set breathlessly agape, and through the open door a flood of hot bright sunshine threw a bar of mote-speckled light across the room, gilding the heads of the scholars who sat swinging their legs on the benches and sending a sort of reflected glint from the white wall up into the sombre shadow of the roof. Such was the Episcopal Grant-in-Aid School of Gleneira one July day, some ten years after Paul Macleod had driven down in the mist to catch the Oban steamer. Without, was a pale, heat-blanched sky set in tall spectral-looking hills which had lost contour and individuality in a haze, blending rock and heather, grass and fern, hollows and heights, into one uniform tint of transparent blue. Between the mountains there was a little level growth of green corn flecked by yellow marigolds, white ox-eyes, and scarlet poppies; then a stretch of dusty road, ending in cool shadows of sycamore and pine, beside the school-house garden. A wonderful garden this. Of Liliputian size, yet holding in its tiny clasp a specimen of almost every plant that grows and blows. Three potato haulms, four cabbages, a dozen onions, half a yard of peas; a tuft of parsley, two bronze-leaved beet-roots, a head of celery. This, flanked by a raspberry cane, a gooseberry bush, and supported by an edge of strawberry plants, constituted the kitchen garden. Beyond, in the trim box-edged border leading to the school-house door, were pansies, roses, geraniums, lilies, and peonies; every conceivable flower, each family represented by one solitary scion. Last, not least, the quaint drops of the Dielytra; which the children with awestruck voices call "The Bishop." For when you strip away the pink, sheathing petals, is there not inside a man in full white lawn sleeves? And is not a man in lawn sleeves a disturbing element in a remote Highland glen, where half the people are rigid Presbyterians? Here in this little garden the bees hum lazily and the butterflies come and go; sometimes one, misled by the stream of sunshine pouring through the open door, floats in among the yawning scholars, rousing them to momentary alertness and a faint wonder as to the ultimate fate of the wanderer; whether he will philosophically give up the enterprise or, foolishly persistent, lose himself amid the smoke-blackened rafters.