Suddenly he came upon a sight that froze his marrow. It was the skeleton of a child,--some poor little wanderer who, like himself, had been lost and who never had returned home. The wind whistled through the small slender bones. They were quite clean, save for a little hair clinging to the skull, from which Ian guessed that it was a boy. He might have been ten or twelve years old. How had he come there? What had brought him to his fate? The clothes had entirely gone save one little shoe. Ian picked it up, looked at it and shivered. Oh, the horror of it! Then the mood changed and he found himself filled with unutterable pity. “Poor child, poor child,” he said; “another victim of a heartless world.” He knelt down and laid his hand on the small skull and his emotion overcame him. Then he gathered the bones together and carried them to a small hollow under a great rock. As he was doing this, his fingers came across something in the grass. It was a small wallet or purse. When he had taken all the bones he managed with some difficulty to cover them with earth and then he built up a little cairn of stones. The small shoe he put with the bones, but the wallet he took with him. With very mingled feelings he struggled up the slope and at last to his great relief he felt the icy blast of the northwest wind, with the ground sloping upward in the right direction. He decided to make for the very summit, the better to check his position, and at last he reached the point and then cautiously made his way in the same manner to what he believed was Cross Fell. It was very slow work and the ground was very wet and heavy; he was footsore and stiff from lack of practice and when the evening began to close in he had made absurdly little headway. At last he felt he could go no further and must spend the night upon the hills. He climbed over the ridge to the leeward side and dropped until he came to the heather line, where he found a dry hollow between some rocks. Tearing up a quantity of heather he made himself a bed to lie on and sat down on the soft extemporised couch. Then he opened the little wallet or pouch that he had found by the skeleton. It contained some knuckle bones and a piece of cord; but with them was a wonderful bracelet of peculiar workmanship. Ian judged it to be Keltic of a very remote date as it somewhat resembled work that a friend had found in the Culbin sands. An inscription and other alterations had been made at a later date. The design was in bold curving shapes that expressed the very spirit of metal. Most remarkable were three large bosses of a strange stone of marvellous hue; they were a deep sky-blue, brilliantly clear and transparent, but with a slight yet most mysterious opalescence in the colour. He had never heard of such a stone and there was something almost uncanny about the way they shone in the dim light. Whether they were original or substitutes for enamel or amber he could not tell. The inscription ran:--