CHAPTER III. 



" Harold was born where restless seas 

 Howl round the storm-swept Orcades." 



Lay of Last Minstrel. 



I LEFT Tain on the ^djof^June by the mail which 

 takes its departure at ten minutes after one A. M., and 

 arrived at Wick the same evening. 



The keen morning air was intensely still ; and when 

 the appropriate silence was occasionally broken by one 

 or two shrill calls upon the guard's long trumpet, its 

 sharp decisive tones awoke the little dunlins and sand- 

 pipers, who feebly responded to its distant echoes with 

 their peculiar whistling kind of note. 



For the next fifteen or twenty miles our route was 

 very beautiful, and at one point of the road, where it 

 rounded the scarp of a grassy declivity, two. noble stags 

 peered at us for a moment from the brow above, and 

 then bounded off into the thicket. Occasionally, and 

 as the scenery becomes more heathery and bare, the 

 blue mountain hares steal amongst the herbage, canter 

 fox-like along the slope, and disappear beyond the 

 brow. We still bowl on ; the sun is bright, but the 

 wind is cold, and here and there a parcel of the 

 Royston or hooded crow (Corvus comix] are busily 



