220 AUGUST ON THE MOORS 



table where the sparkling wax-lights are reflecting 

 themselves in plate and crystal and amber wine. How 

 the talk flows as the evening goes on ! If you don't 

 hurry your memory it leisurely brings you back each 

 incident of the day in most minute detail a panorama 

 of sharp-cut impressions and photographs everything 

 on your mental retina, down to the very stones and 

 heather-tussocks where you dropped your grouse ; the 

 shallow reach of water that winged bird splashed 

 through to seek a vain concealment among the over- 

 hanging heather-roots ; the black sedge-fringed pool by 

 the grey boulder where you flushed the unsuspecting 

 mallard ; and then the well-won repose, as you nestle 

 snugly in the blankets ; for after the sunny day the 

 air that comes in through the casements feels some- 

 thing more than cool as it fans cheeks still flushed 

 with exertion and that glorious header in the 

 morning, when you leap into the lake and life, to 

 emerge dripping as a water-god in the vigour of his 

 immortal strength. 



Not that the life of the moors has nothing but its 

 sunny side : very far from it indeed. The heather 

 would never grow so rank, nor the grass in the corries 

 so green, if floods did not come like familiar things 

 to the barren soil that teems in the luxuriance of its 

 wild vegetation. How it does pour when the weather 

 makes up its mind to it : Holland would be swamped 

 in its rivers and the ocean waves, if it had but a 

 single season of the weather of the western Highlands. 

 Luckily Providence arranges a perfect system of natural 



