202 AUGUST ON THE MOORS 



serves as cloak-room, gun-room, parcel-delivery office, 

 &c. leads to the more spacious sitting-room, whose 

 double windows, with their storm-gallery, command 

 the lake. To the left, kitchen and offices ; to the 

 right, the fir-panelled packing-cases, where you accom- 

 modate your wardrobe on pegs in the wall, and stow 

 yourself of nights in a compromise between the bunk 

 of the forecastle and the box-bed of the shieling. If 

 your toilette is performed in a series of adroit gymnas- 

 tics between the bath and the table, the want of 

 elbow-room within is compensated by the sense of 

 space and freedom without. The breeze, faintly 

 fragrant with the peat-reek and heather-bloom, that 

 comes breathing in at the open window, was playing 

 the moment before with the heaving or tumbling 

 waters plucking a second or two before that at the 

 stunted grass and the lichens that thatch, tant bien 

 que mal, the rocky scalps of the mountain-lake wall. 

 The place can be repelling enough, when the little 

 garden is packed with snow in a December storm from 

 palisade to palisade ; when the wreathes are heaped 

 high against the dimmed windows, tumbling in on 

 the floor by shovelfuls when you succeed in forcing 

 the frozen sashes ; when it is a work of doubt and 

 danger travelling through the blinding drift for the 

 twenty yards that divide you from the keeper's cottage ; 

 when your vain attempt to visit the yet nearer kennel 

 lands you in the peat-stack at the opposite angle of 

 the lodge. It can be sufficiently triste even in an 

 unpropitious August, when the rain, tumbling out of 



