Then I got out the glass and reconnoitred.  There was my friend, sure enough; moreover, he was playing a very respectable trout.  But he was fishing on the near side of the loch, and though I had quite a distinct view of his back, and indeed of all his attenuated form, I was as far as ever from recognising him, or guessing where, if anywhere, I had seen him before.  I now determined to stalk him; but this was not too easy, as there is literally no cover on the hillside except a long march dyke of the usual loose stones, which ran down to the loch-side, and indeed three or four feet into the loch, reaching it at a short distance to the right of the angler.  Behind this I skulked, in an eagerly undignified manner, and was just about to climb the wall unobserved, when two grouse got up, with their wild “cluck cluck” of alarm, and flew down past the angler and over the loch.  He did not even look round, but jerked his line out of the water, reeled it up, and set off walking along the loch-side.  He was making, no doubt, for the little glen up which I fancied that he must have retreated on the first occasion when saw him.  I set off walking round the tarn on my own side—­the left side—­expecting to anticipate him, and that he must pass me on his way up the little burnside.  But I had miscalculated the distance, or the pace.  He was first at the burnside; and now I cast courtesy and everything but curiosity to the winds, and deliberately followed him.  He was a few score of yards ahead of me, walking rapidly, when he suddenly climbed the burnside to the left, and was lost to my eyes for a few moments.  I reached the place, ascended the steep green declivity and found myself on the open undulating moor, with no human being in sight!

The grass and heather were short.  I saw no bush, no hollow, where he could by any possibility have hidden himself.  Had he met a Boojum he could not have more “softly and suddenly vanished away.”

I make no pretence of being more courageous than my neighbours, and, in this juncture, perhaps I was less so.  The long days of loneliness in waste Glen Aline, and too many solitary cigarettes, had probably injured my nerve.  So, when I suddenly heard a sigh and the half-smothered sound of a convulsive cough-hollow, if ever a cough was hollow—­hard by me, at my side as it were, and yet could behold no man, nor any place where a man might conceal himself—­nothing but moor and sky and tufts of rushes—­then I turned away, and walked down the glen:  not slowly.  I shall not deny that I often looked over my shoulder as I went, and that, when I reached the loch, I did not angle without many a backward glance.  Such an appearance and disappearance as this, I remembered, were in the experience of Sir Walter Scott.  Lockhart does not tell the anecdote, which is in a little anonymous volume, “Recollections of Sir Walter Scott,” published before Lockhart’s book.  Sir Walter reports that he was once riding