A SHOOTING LODGE 203 



opened sluices, drops impenetrable curtains between the 

 steaming window-panes and the outer world. And 

 sometimes it feels eerie enough of a night in late 

 September, when you are reading yourself to sleep 

 by a flickering candle, to the sad symphony of winds 

 sighing and moaning in the stunted fir-plantation, like 

 scores of j^Eolian harps gone melancholy mad. But 

 see it of a sunny afternoon on the eleventh, when you 

 have travelled straight by crowded limited mail from 

 the smoky, sulphureous purgatory of St. James's, where 

 you have been doing society for months past, fevered 

 in the frame, fagged in the stomach, and, as you begin 

 shrewdly to suspect, slightly touched in the liver. You 

 have been breathing in laughing-gas for the last few 

 hours, as you dragged up by heather, and bracken, and 

 hill-locked meadow, through pine-woods and feathering 

 glades of natural birch, as you crossed and recrossed the 

 silver stream that laughed you a welcome as it came 

 leaping down the strath from the lake that filters it 

 beneath your windows. You are half beside yourself 

 with the bright intoxication that is untroubled by any 

 sinister shadow of the inevitable reaction, with just 

 sense sufficient of yesterday's weariness and boredom 

 to make you hail the idea of a peaceful sojourn in this 

 Eden. There stands your unpretending home, bloom- 

 ing in the bright paint of its gay spring hues, smiling 

 cheerily at you as if an infallible barometer were screwed 

 fast at set-fair, as if summer sunshine were eternal, and 

 there had been no such thing as winter wear and tear. 

 The peat smoke curling up cosily out of the kitchen 



