It was not until half-past four in the afternoon that the long railway journey came to an end; and during that time he had come upon many a scene of historical interest and pictorial beauty. He had been within a short distance of the mournful ’haughs of Cromdale;’ he had crossed Culloden Moor. Nearing Forres, he had come within sight of the Northern Sea; and thereafter had skirted the blue ruffled waters of the Moray, and Cromarty, and Dornoch Firths. But even when he had got to Lairg, a little hamlet at the foot of Loch Shin, his travelling for the day was not nearly over; there still remained a drive of four-and-twenty miles; and although it was now dusk and the weather threatened a change, he preferred to push on that night. Travelling did not seem to tire him much; no doubt he was familiar with immeasurably greater distances in his own country. Moreover, he had learned that there was nothing particular to look at in the stretch of wild moorland that lay between him and his destination; and then again, if it was dark now, there would be moonlight later on. So he ate his dinner leisurely and in content, until a waggonette with two stout horses was brought round; then he got in; and presently they were away from the little hamlet and out in a strange land of darkness and silence, scarcely anything visible around them, the only sound the jog-trot clatter of the horses’ feet. It was a desperately lonely drive. The road appeared to go over interminable miles of flat or scarcely undulating moorland; and even when the moonlight began to make the darkness faintly visible, that only increased the sense of solitude, for there was not even a single tree to break the monotony of the sombre horizon line. It had begun to rain also: not actual rain, but a kind of thin drizzle, that seemed to mix itself up with the ineffectual moonlight, and throw a wan haze over these far-reaching and desolate wastes. Tramp, tramp went the horses’ feet through this ghostly world; the wet mist grew thicker and thicker and clung around the traveller’s hair; it was a chilling mist, moreover, and seemed to search for weak places about the throat. The only sharply defined objects that the eye could rest on were the heads and upthrown ears of the horses, that shone in the light sent forward by the lamps: all else was a formless wilderness of gloom, shadows following shadows, and ever the desolate landscape stretching on and on, and losing itself in the night. The American stood up in the waggonette, perhaps to shake off for a second the clammy sensation of the wet. ’Say, young man,’ he observed—but in an absent kind of way, for he was regarding, as far as that was possible, the dusky undulations of the mournful landscape—’don’t you think now, that for a good wholesome dose of God-forsakenness, this’ll about take the cake?’ ’Ah beg your paurdon, sir,’ said the driver, who was apparently a Lowlander.