added, “It’s no the good man at the farm--nor the work--nor the pay. It’s just this: I’m fair clemmed at the sight o’ yon hills ... eh, but they’re just dreidful. I couldna’ abide them. They’re na _human_. I’ve felt it all along since I cam up beyont the Ochils, but it’s only the now I’ve kent weel I couldna’ live here amang them.” “Weel, first and foremost,” he added, when I pressed him further, “it’s the silence. It fair kills me. An’ what’s more, it _would_ kill me if I stayed. The wife up yonder gave me a sup o’ milk an’ a bannock, an’ when I was at them I sat on a bench an’ looked about me. Naething but hills, hills, hills: hills an’ black gloom an’ that awfu’ silence. An’ there was a burd--a whaup we ca’ it in the southlands--which fair shook my mind. It went lamentin’ like a grave-bell, an’ I heard it long after it was out o’ sicht. Then there wasn’t another sound. Na, na, wark or no wark, I’m awa’ south.” And so the wayfarer set foot to the white road again, the south spelling home and human solace to him. Those dreary coal-lands, where the green grass is wan and the thorn hedge sombre, and any wandering water illucid and defiled, those hideous heaps of ‘shag,’ those gaunt mine-chimneys, those squalid hamlets in a populous desolation--these meant ‘human comfort’ to him. Or, if they did not, at least they gave him somewhat which the mountain silence denied, which the gathered hills withheld, which the moorland solitudes overbore and refuted. An extreme case, no doubt. But the deep disquietude of hill silence, of the mountain solitude, is felt by most habitual dwellers in towns and thronged communities. There is no mountain charm for these except the charm of release, of holiday, of novelty, of an imagined delight, of contrast, of unwonted air, of unfamiliar aspect. One of the popular excursion resorts in the near highlands of Argyll and Dumbarton is Loch Goil Head. A dweller there told me last autumn that of the hundreds who land every week, and especially on Saturdays and Fair holidays, and generally with an impatient eagerness, by far the greater number soon tire of the loneliness of the hills a brief way inland, and become depressed, and with a new and perhaps perturbing eagerness seek again the house-clad ways and the busy shore; and seem content, an hour or two before their steamer sails, to sit where they can see the movement of familiar life, and turn their back upon the strangely oppressive loneliness, so perturbingly remote, so paralyzingly silent.