the broken crag.  He had lain on all the beds of leaf and moss, and talked with every creeping or flying or running thing.  Sometimes he read a book here, sometimes he pictured the world, or built fantastic stages, and among fantastic others acted himself a fantastic part.  Sometimes with a blind turning within he looked for himself.  He had his own thoughts of God here, of God and the Kirk and the devil.  Often, too, he neither read, dreamed, nor thought.  He might lie an hour, still, passive, receptive.  The trees and the clouds, crag life, bird life, and flower life, life of water, earth, and air, came inside.  He was so used to his own silence in the glen that when he walked through it with others he kept it still.  Slightly taciturn everywhere, he was actively so here.  The path narrowing, he and Ian must go in single file.  Leading, Alexander traveled in silence, and Ian, behind, not familiar with the place, must mind his steps, and so fell silent, too.  Here and there, now and then, Alexander halted.  These were recesses, or it might be projecting platforms of rock, that he liked.  Below, the stream made still pools, or moved in eddies, or leaped with an innumerable hurrying noise from level to level.  Or again there held a reach of quiet water, and the glen-sides were soft with weeping birch, and there showed a wider arch of still blue sky.  Alexander stood and looked.  Ian, behind him, was glad of the pause.  The place dizzied him who for years had been away from hill and mountain, pass and torrent.  Yet he would by no means tell Alexander so.  He would keep up with him.

There was a mile of this glen, and now the going was worse and now it was better.  Three-fourths of the way through they came to an opening in the rock, over which, from a shelf above, fell a curtain of brier.

“See!” said Alexander, and, parting the stems, showed a veritable cavern.  “Come in—­sit down!  The Kelpie’s Pool is out of the glen, but they say that there’s a bogle wons here, too.”

They sat down upon the rocky floor strewn with dead leaves.  Through the dropped curtain they saw the world brokenly; the light in the cave was sunken and dim, the air cold.  Ian drew his shoulders together.

“Here’s a grand place for robbers, wraiths, or dragons!”

“Robbers, wraiths, or dragons, or just quiet dead leaves and ourselves.  Look here—!” He showed a heap of short fagots in a corner.  “I put these here the last time I came.”  Dragging them into the middle of the rock chamber, he swept up with them the dead leaves, then took from a great pouch that he carried on his rambles a box with flint and steel.  He struck a spark upon dry moss and in a moment had a fire.  “Is not that beautiful?”