It needed not this last account to spur me on to visit him.  I only doubted whether or not I should endeavour to see Idris again, before I departed.  This doubt was decided on the following day.  Early in the morning Raymond came to me; intelligence had arrived that Adrian was dangerously ill, and it appeared impossible that his failing strength should surmount the disorder.  “To-morrow,” said Raymond, “his mother and sister set out for Scotland to see him once again.”

“And I go to-day,” I cried; “this very hour I will engage a sailing balloon; I shall be there in forty-eight hours at furthest, perhaps in less, if the wind is fair.  Farewell, Raymond; be happy in having chosen the better part in life.  This turn of fortune revives me.  I feared madness, not sickness—­I have a presentiment that Adrian will not die; perhaps this illness is a crisis, and he may recover.”

Everything favoured my journey.  The balloon rose about half a mile from the earth, and with a favourable wind it hurried through the air, its feathered vans cleaving the unopposing atmosphere.  Notwithstanding the melancholy object of my journey, my spirits were exhilarated by reviving hope, by the swift motion of the airy pinnace, and the balmy visitation of the sunny air.  The pilot hardly moved the plumed steerage, and the slender mechanism of the wings, wide unfurled, gave forth a murmuring noise, soothing to the sense.  Plain and hill, stream and corn-field, were discernible below, while we unimpeded sped on swift and secure, as a wild swan in his spring-tide flight.  The machine obeyed the slightest motion of the helm; and, the wind blowing steadily, there was no let or obstacle to our course.  Such was the power of man over the elements; a power long sought, and lately won; yet foretold in by-gone time by the prince of poets, whose verses I quoted much to the astonishment of my pilot, when I told him how many hundred years ago they had been written:—­

  Oh! human wit, thou can’st invent much ill,
  Thou searchest strange arts:  who would think by skill,
  An heavy man like a light bird should stray,
  And through the empty heavens find a way?

I alighted at Perth; and, though much fatigued by a constant exposure to the air for many hours, I would not rest, but merely altering my mode of conveyance, I went by land instead of air, to Dunkeld.  The sun was rising as I entered the opening of the hills.  After the revolution of ages Birnam hill was again covered with a young forest, while more aged pines, planted at the very commencement of the nineteenth century by the then Duke of Athol, gave solemnity and beauty to the scene.  The rising sun first tinged the pine tops; and my mind, rendered through my mountain education deeply susceptible of the graces of nature, and now on the eve of again beholding my beloved and perhaps dying friend, was strangely influenced by the sight of those distant beams:  surely they were ominous, and as such I regarded them, good omens for Adrian, on whose life my happiness depended.