lichened boulders and loose disarray of speckled The 

 granite and dark and grey basalt and trap — an Hill-Tarn, 

 ideal cover, for even a keen following gaze 

 could not discern the living from the inanimate. 



Truly the eagle, the hill-fox, and the ptar- 

 migan are 'the eldest children of the hill.' 

 The stag may climb thus high too at times, 

 for outlook, or for the intoxication of desola- 

 tion and of illimitable vastness ; sometimes the 

 hawks soar over the wilderness ; even the 

 mountain -hares sometimes reach and race 

 desperately across these high arid wastes. But 

 these all come as men in forlorn and lonely 

 lands climb the grey uninhabitable mountains 

 beyond them, seeking to know that which they 

 cannot see beneath, seeking often for they know 

 not what. They are not dwellers there. The 

 stag, that mountain-lover, cannot inhabit waste 

 rock ; the red grouse would perish where the 

 ptarmigan thrives and is content. 



How little has been written about these 

 birds of the mountain-brow. What poetry is 

 in their name, for those who know the hills. 

 They dwell higher than the highest June-flight 

 of the tireless swift, higher than the last reaches 

 of the sunrise -leaping larks. Cities might 

 crumble away in pale clouds of dust, floods 

 might whelm every lowland, great fires might 

 devour the forests and the red insatiable myriad 



53 



