Meanwhile Hamish makes way steadily, though by tortuous windings. None but a native bred on the spot could conduct a vehicle safely by night across these moors. Where unaccustomed eyes can make out no sign whatever of a track, and where a single mistake would send one wheel floundering into a peat-hag and the other spinning in the air, or capsize the whole equipage into the miry abysses of a bog, Hamish leads confidently on, with no worse result than the jolting of a rugged road. The mare is a sturdy beast of the small sure-footed Arran breed, now dying out, and she pulls away gallantly among rocks and heath-tufts that would bring any other sort of horse to quick disaster. It takes her master all his time to keep up with her on the rough ground, and he has breath left for no more than an occasional “Ay, ay,” or “’Deed, yes, sir!” in the true Arran accent. English is evidently the less familiar language to him; his remarks to the mare, _sotto voce_, are in Gaelic. All last month after nightfall tufts and sheets of flame were to be seen among the darkness of the hills; for in March they burn the heather on the sheep-farms to let the young herbage come up, and the conflagrations which appear then as pillars of smoke by day become pillars of fire by night. But in April the moorland birds have begun to build their nests, and the hills are left to them in darkness and in peace. The only light to be seen from the cart is that in the window of the croft far behind, which will be kept aglow by thoughtful hands as a guide till Hamish’s return after moonset. Over the brow of the moor, however, the shining lights of the clachan at the mountain foot before long come into sight, and away to the right, tremulous with silver and shadows, the sheen of the moonlight can be made out on the sea. Rapidly now the path descends, plunging presently through lanes of high thorn hedges where the stars are all but shut out overhead. The rush of a river is heard, the wheels grate harshly on the gravel, there is a sudden and vigorous splashing of hoofs, and the mare has passed the ford. Then a half-mile of climb uphill on a good road, and Hamish stands still with his charge at the door of the inn. BY A WESTERN FIRTH. “Good-bye, my dear!” How beautiful the old lady looks as she stands in the porch overclustered with its tangle of budding roses and honeysuckle, a kindly smile on her lips, and her eyes shining, and her silver hair, in the last light of afternoon! For the sun is setting now, across the water, behind the hills of Bute, and the glory that fills the heavens and floods the full-ebbed sea casts about her, in its departing moments, a halo of peace serene as the hours of her life’s own afternoon. “Good-bye, my dear!”