There, for a long month, amidst the scent of the honeysuckle, the gorse and the heather, and the smell of the bracken and the pine, they fished, they shot, they smoked, they talked. Late in the evening, after they had rolled themselves into their hammocks, they heard the murmuring of the trees down the length of the glen, like near and distant sea-waves, and saw, above the soaring pine-trunks, the gleaming of the sky with its stars. As they shouted their last "Good-night" to each other from the depths of their swaying beds the dogs would be barking at Dan Baldromma's mill at the bottom of the glen and the water would be plashing in the topmost fall of it. And then night would come, perfect night, and the silence of unbroken sleep. Awaking with the dawn they would see the last stars pale out and hear the first birds begin to call; then the cock would crow at old Will Skillicorne's croft on the "brough," the sheep would bleat in the fields beyond, the squirrels would squeak in the branches over their heads and the fish would leap in the river below. And then, as the sun came striding down on them from the hilltops to the east, they would tumble out of their hammocks, strip and plunge into the glen stream--the deep, round, blue dubs of it, in which the glistening water would lash their bodies like a living element. And then they would run up to the headland (still in the state of nature) and race over the heather like wild horses in the fresh and nipping air. They were doing this one midsummer morning when they had an embarrassing experience, which, in the devious ways of destiny, was not to be without its results. Flying headlong down the naked side of the glen (for sake of the faster run) they suddenly became aware of somebody coming up. It was a young woman in a sunbonnet. She was driving four or five heifers to the mountain. Swishing a twig in her hand and calling to her cattle, she was making straight for their camping-place. The young men looked around, but there was no escape on any side, so down they went full length on their faces in the long grass (how short!) and buried their noses in the earth. In that position of blind helplessness, there was nothing to do but wait until the girl and her cattle had passed, and hope to be unobserved. They could hear the many feet of the heifers, the flapping of their tails (the flies must be pestering them) and the frequent calls of the girl. On she came, with a most deliberate slowness, and her voice, which had been clear and sharp when she was lower down the glen, seemed to them to have a gurgling note in it as she came nearer to where they lay. "Come out of that, you gawk, and get along, will you?" she cried, and Victor could not be quite sure that it was only the cattle she was calling to.