How they enraged him, as he read—just as their writer used to do in days gone by—with what an impotent rage against this trivial feminine thing that he despised, and yet that had had power enough almost to ruin his life! Yet the letters brought decision, for they shaped his course, which now definitely took the westward route, towards the Perthshire highlands. All this time, as he pondered, he had been riding through the classic country—sacred even then, as it is still, to the genius and the name of Burns. He had taken his way along the broad and river-haunted valley of the Nith; he had threaded the wild and hilly country of the Cumnocks; he had rested at Mauchline, and might have seen, without knowing it, Mossgiel. All around him, rich and fair, yellow now to its abundant harvests, spread the country that had nursed the peasant poet to his Titanic manhood—noble valley—rolling river—fertile plain. The lowly farms were eloquent of him; each humble implement of toil—the plough, the harrow and the reaper’s hook—spoke of the hardy labours of his strenuous youth. The woods whispered of him; the summer evening breathed the legend of his first idyllic love—seemed instinct with the young undoing of Jean Armour, with the kiss, the jest, the gaiety of rustic courtship. At inn and toll, at kirk and market—yet rang the echoes of his splendid joviality, and by haunted kirkyard wall, and clattering arch and hoary brig, it seemed as though you yet might hear the thundering hoofs of flying Tam o’ Shanter’s auld mare Maggie. One name only seemed ever on the lips of men and women—and Herries heard it, as it seemed to him, wherever he rode, wherever he rested, wherever he spoke, or ate or slept upon that memorable journey. Strange irony of fate that should lead him—the instinctive enemy of the dead poet—antipathetic to him in every thought and impulse and idea—to haunt these scenes. Stranger still that he should come to them fresh from the last great scene of all—the closing scene in that tremendous tragedy of a poet’s life. Even Herries—unimaginative, unsympathetic, cold—felt the coincidence, and felt with it some singular, reluctant, vague understanding of the spirit that had passed away, even though his own wrongs, and the deeper wrongs of another, from the dead man’s very hand, cried out for their too-long-delayed redress. In this unwonted and unwelcome mingling of moods, he took his way, riding up the western coasts from Ayr, crossing the Clyde near Glasgow, striking inland to the mountain land up by Loch Lomond, through the exquisite wild Highland country of Glen Falloch; and so, by pass and glen, and wood and water, fertile strath and harvest fields, down to the lowlands again, and the tamer country of the Ochills. One summer night found him, at length, at the last gate of the Highlands, the little town of C——, and he knew that he rested but two miles from Alison’s home, if indeed Alison were still Alison Graham and had a home at The Mains.