148 THE AMATEUR TRAMP IN SCOTLAND 



heavy knuckles interrupted your slumbers he had 

 nothing very satisfactory to say. The clouds of the 

 evening sky were a joke to the morning grimness. 

 You looked out from your window on curtains of 

 vapour that shrouded alike the loch and the mountain. 

 There was nothing reassuring in the feeling of the 

 wind, that fanned your forehead like the forerunner of 

 rain, and vexed your ear with a watery sough. But a 

 man must trust something to fate, and inaction in the 

 Highlands is immeasurably depressing. You take heart 

 of grace and start. You hear the bell of the early 

 steamer chiming somewhere out of blank space like a 

 fog-signal. For anything you can see, setting tem- 

 perature out of the question, you might as well be in 

 the innermost recesses of a double-heated Turkish bath. 

 But you have lost your road before, and as yet it is not 

 easy to mistake it ; so you set the stout heart to the 

 stey brae, and boldly burn your bridges behind you. 

 And you receive your rich reward, even sooner than 

 you had dared to hope. There are light rifts over- 

 head that quickly widen and brighten. When the sun 

 has once unlocked the wheels of his chariot he swiftly 

 follows up his advantage. The vapoury veils have not 

 a chance with him ; they shrivel up into drifting shreds 

 before his blaze, and float away into cool corners and 

 nooks. The whole resplendent prospect to the seaward 

 lies extended all of a sudden at your feet, seen through 

 a limpid transparency that throws everything into sharp- 

 edged relief. The gleaming crescent of the breaking 

 $urf and the rippling waters of the loch beyond it ; the 



