However, on this blustering and brilliant morning he had not come all the way up hither merely to get a brace of hares for Mrs. Murray, nor yet to be a distant spectator of the salmon-fishing going on far below. Under this big rock there was a considerable cavity, and right at the back of that he had wedged in a wooden box lined with tin, and fitted with a lid and a lock. It was useful in the autumn; he generally kept in it a bottle of whisky and a few bottles of soda-water, lest any of the gentlemen should find themselves thirsty on the way home from the stalking. But on this occasion, when he got out the key and unlocked the little chest, it was not any refreshment of that kind he was after. He took out a copy-book—a cheap paper-covered thing such as is used in juvenile schools in Scotland—and turned to the first page, which was scrawled over with pencilled lines that had apparently been written in time of rain, for there were plenty of smudges there. It had become a habit of his that, when in these lonely rambles among the hills, he found some further rhymes about Meenie come into his head, he would jot them down in this copy-book, deposit it in the little chest, and probably not see them again for weeks and weeks, when, as on the present occasion, he would come with fresh eyes to see it there were any worth or value in them. Not that he took such trouble with anything else. His rhyming epistles to his friends, his praises of his terrier Harry, his songs for the Inver-Mudal lasses to sing—these things were thrown off anyhow, and had to take their chance. But his solitary intercommunings away amid these alpine wastes were of a more serious cast; insensibly they gathered dignity and repose from the very silence and awfulness of the solitudes around; there was no idle and pastoral singing here about roses in the lane. He regarded the blurred lines, striving to think of them as having been written by somebody else: _Through the long sad centuries Clebrig slept,_ _Nor a sound the silence broke,_ _Till a morning in Spring a strange new thing_ _Betrayed him and he awoke;_ _And he laughed, and his joyous laugh was heard_ _From Erribol far to Tongue;_ _And his granite veins deep down were stirred,_ _And the great old mountain grew young._ _’Twas Love Meenie he saw, and she walked by the shore,_ _And she sang so sweet and so clear,_ _That the sound of her voice made him see again_ _The dawn of the world appear;_ _And at night he spake to the listening stars_ _And charged them a guard to keep_ _On the hamlet of Inver-Mudal there_ _And the maid in her innocent sleep,_ _Till the years should go by; and they should see_ _Love Meenie take her stand_ _’Mong the maidens around the footstool of God—_ _She gentlest of all the band!_ He tore the leaf out, folded it, and put it in his pocket.