24 CHAPTER III. 



.280, in a full-length black soft leather scabbard. The rifle was mine, 

 but the scabbard was not. We followed a winding well-made path 

 by the burnside, skirting the edges of high hills with peaks looming 

 over all in the near distance. 



The sun shone brightly down, harbinger of happy days in the deer 

 forest of Benmore for the Yankee sportsman who had come so far 

 to taste the quality of Scottish bird shooting and then against his 

 will had been forced to stalk the deer. 



Scots are silent men ; few words suffice for them, especially where 

 strangers are concerned, and only the rub of saddle leather, the rattle 

 of stones beneath hoofs and nail shod shoes broke in upon the water 

 sounds, which the Highlands always offer. From the roaring rush 

 of a big burn over its rock-strewn way to the thin tinkle of the tiny 

 rill hurrying on to join its big brother, in these hills one need never, 

 in fact, one cannot ever unless he be deaf get out of the sound 

 of the music of the waters to which all songs of Mountain Scotland 

 must be written, if they ring true. 



By the pathside, moss everywhere gray and bronze-brown and green 

 and gray-black and gray-green and yellow and purple, forms a resting 

 place for baby buttercups, golden-eyed and sweet, neath heather-bells 

 swinging in time to the heart-throbs of the fairies. 



All the herbage has colors to delight. Here is a gully; its sides 

 black as ink; peat. There another browny-red; granite. In their 

 bottoms it may be a burn a foot or fifty feet wide. Tip-topmost of 

 all the hills in front of us Benmore (Highest Hill) the loftiest peak 

 in Sutherlandshire ; flanking it, serrated ridges almost as high, cameo- 

 cut against the blue, their crests cloud-wrapped and hidden this 

 moment, the veil rent and their nakedness staring the next. 



A stern, strange, hard, beautiful, mild, rough, fine, coarse land. 

 Not one for weak men or silly women. A place to breed sturdy sons 

 and sterling daughters. High Lands indeed. And by their height 

 nearer to the Source of All. 



From the first little hill looking backward through gently eddying 

 blue pipe smoke, I glimpsed Loch Ailish, where it lay a beautiful 

 blue jewel in its emerald-colored, brown overlaid setting, at its upper 

 edge the lodge, gray-sided and red-roofed, stern and forbidding on 

 the outside as are these hills if one only looks for outer things 

 but with the warmth of a real welcome for who should pass within. 



