Among the Grahams, who yet have adopted a chequer of green and blue, the former colour was avoided, since Dundee had on a green coat at Killiecrankie, and thus, as the Highlanders whispered, made himself target for a silver bullet. At the other end of the Highlands, the Sinclairs have not forgotten how in a green uniform they set out for the carnage of Flodden. The suit of Lincoln green worn by the Knight of Snowdon might be supposed to blame for the ill-luck of his chase; but as matter of fact it is on record how King James got a suit of tartan made for his Highland excursions. An uglier and more perilous brood of spirits were the _Urisks_ who haunted the misty mountains, with Ben Venue for their Brocken. Then every lake had its malignant _kelpie_, that in the Highlands usually takes the form of a water-bull, or horse, to be avoided like any loathly dragon. I have mentioned such a monster on the Tay; and Loch Vennachar has its own legend of the same kind, how on its banks a horse appeared among a band of children, so pretty, and to all seeming so gentle, that one of them ventured to mount it, then another and another, the creature drawing out its back like a telescope till the whole laughing party were astride, when it plunged into the water, carrying down all but the one who, in such stories, is bound to escape for telling the tale. I fancy that kelpies, banshees, brownies, and the like uncanny creatures are not so well-known in Perthshire to-day as in the Western Highlands; but here, too, old folks, rather than young ones, may go warily by certain spots after dark. In the middle of last century a young lad whom a German tourist took as guide from Callander was able to cheer the way by eerie stories, one of a whisky smuggler accepting the invitation of an unearthly spirit to dance with her for an hour or so, as it seemed, then on reaching home he found his wife turned grey and his young children grown up. Even yet, upon the Highland line, you may find the Scottish character not all one grey shepherd’s plaid of stern theology and hard-headed shrewdness. Ben Ledi, “the sacred mount,” was an ancient scene of pagan rites such as those which Roderick Dhu’s weird chaplain mingled with the ordinances of Christianity. I shall never forget a day I spent at its foot, that black Twelfth of August, through which a prolonged thunderstorm raged over Scotland, striking down members of more than one shooting party, on moors overcast by so awful darkness that Benjamin Franklin himself might have heard the voice of offended mountain spirits. Has the reader ever come in for a thunderstorm in the Highlands? Here is the late Mr. A. I. Shand’s account of such an experience as often gives a certain zest of danger to a sportsman’s beat.