It was, as we have said, a lovely summer morning when Colin set out on his excursion, after the fatigues¹ of the winter and spring. His first stage was naturally Ramore, where he arrived the same evening, having picked up Lauderdale at Glasgow on his way. A more beautiful evening had never shone over the Holy Loch; and, as the two friends approached Ramore, all the western sky was flaming behind the dark hills, which stood up in austere² shadow, shutting out from the loch and its immediate³ banks the later glories of the sunset. To leave the eastern shore, where the light still lingered, and steal up under the shadow into the soft beginning of the twilight⁴, with Ramore, that “shines where it stands,” looking out hospitably⁵ from the brae, was like leaving the world of noise and commotion⁶ for the primitive⁷ life, with its silence and its thoughts; and so, indeed, Colin felt it, though his world was but another country parish, primitive enough in its ways. But then it must not be forgotten that there is a difference between the kingdom of Fife, where wheat grows golden on the broad fields, and where the herrings come up to the shore to be salted and packed in barrels, and the sweet Loch half hidden among the hills, where the cornfields are scant⁸ and few, and where grouse⁹ and heather divide the country with the beasts and the pastures, and where, in short, Gaelic was spoken within the memory of man. Perhaps there was something of the vanity of youth in that look of observation and half amused, half curious criticism which the young man cast upon the peaceful manse, where it did not seem as if anything could ever happen, and where the minister, who had red hair, had painfully begun his career when Colin himself was a boy. The manse of Afton was not nearly so lovely, but—it was different; though perhaps he could not have told how. And the same thought was in his mind as he went on past all the

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