And she held up a great dog fox by the brush before throwing the body into a convenient moss-hole. It was Alexander-Jonita, the lass whom our college-bred Quintin had once called the Diana of Balmaghie. I care not what he called her. Without question she was the finest lass in the countryside. And that I will maintain to this day. “Are you going home, Jonita?” cried I, for the direction in which she was proceeding led directly away from the house of Drumglass. “No,” she answered carelessly, “I am biding all night in the upper ‘buchts.’ The foxes have been very troublesome of late, and I am thinning them with the gun. I have the feck of the lambs penned up there.” “And who is with you to help you?” I asked her in astonishment. “Only the dogs,” she made answer, shifting the gun from one shoulder to the other. “But, lassie,” I cried, “ye surely do not sleep out on the hills all your lone like this?” “And what for no?” she answered sharply. “What sweeter bed than a truss of heather? What safer than with two rough tykes of dogs and a good gun at one’s elbow, with the clear airs blowing over and the sheep lying snugly about the folds?” “But when it rains,” I went on, still doubtfully. “Come and see,” she laughed; “we are near the upper ‘buchts’ now!” Great stone walls of rough hill boulders, uncut and unquarried, rose before me. I saw a couple of rough collies sit guardian one at either side of the little lintelled gate that led within. The warm smell of gathered sheep, ever kindly and welcome to a hill man, saluted my nostrils as I came near. A lamb bleated, and in the quiet I could hear it run pattering to nose its mother. Alexander-Jonita led me about the great “bucht” to a niche formed by a kind of cairn built into the side of a wall of natural rock. Here a sort of rude shelter had been made with posts driven into the crevices of the rock and roughly covered with turves of heather round the sides of a ten-foot enclosure. The floor was of bare dry rock, but along one side there was arranged a couch of heather tops recently pulled, very soft and elastic. At first I could not see all this quite clearly in the increasing darkness, but after a little, bit by bit the plan of the shelter dawned upon me, as my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. “When it rains,” she said, going back to my question, “I set a post in the middle for a tent pole, spread my plaid over it and fasten it down at the sides with stones.” “Jonita,” said I, “does your sister never come up hither with you?” “Who--our Jean!” she cried, astonished, “faith, no! Jean takes better with the inside of a box-bed and the warmth of the _peat-grieshoch_[11] on the hearth! And, indeed, the lass is not over-strong. But as for me, more than the cheeping of the house-mice, I love the chunnering of the wild fowl in their nests and the bleat of the sheep. These are honey and sweetness to me.”