and sky and temperature of the weather, flashed back into my mind with the reality of dreams.  The unknown in the green-coat had been the Great Unknown!  I had met Scott; I had heard a story from his lips; I should have been able to write, to claim acquaintance, to tell him that his legend still tingled in my ears.  But the discovery came too late, and the great man had already succumbed under the load of his honours and misfortunes.

Presently, after giving us a cigar apiece, Scott bade us farewell and disappeared with his daughter over the hills.  And when I applied to Sim for information, his answer of ’The Shirra, man!  A’body kens the Shirra!’ told me, unfortunately, nothing.

A more considerable adventure falls to be related.  We were now near the border.  We had travelled for long upon the track beaten and browsed by a million herds, our predecessors, and had seen no vestige of that traffic which had created it.  It was early in the morning when we at last perceived, drawing near to the drove road, but still at a distance of about half a league, a second caravan, similar to but larger than our own.  The liveliest excitement was at once exhibited by both my comrades.  They climbed hillocks, they studied the approaching drove from under their hand, they consulted each other with an appearance of alarm that seemed to me extraordinary.  I had learned by this time that their stand-oft manners implied, at least, no active enmity; and I made bold to ask them what was wrong.

‘Bad yins,’ was Sim’s emphatic answer.

All day the dogs were kept unsparingly on the alert, and the drove pushed forward at a very unusual and seemingly unwelcome speed.  All day Sim and Candlish, with a more than ordinary expenditure both of snuff and of words, continued to debate the position.  It seems that they had recognised two of our neighbours on the road—­ one Faa, and another by the name of Gillies.  Whether there was an old feud between them still unsettled I could never learn; but Sim and Candlish were prepared for every degree of fraud or violence at their hands.  Candlish repeatedly congratulated himself on having left ‘the watch at home with the mistress’; and Sim perpetually brandished his cudgel, and cursed his ill-fortune that it should be sprung.

‘I willna care a damn to gie the daashed scoon’rel a fair clout wi’ it,’ he said.  ‘The daashed thing micht come sindry in ma hand.’

‘Well, gentlemen,’ said I, ’suppose they do come on, I think we can give a very good account of them.’  And I made my piece of holly, Ronald’s gift, the value of which I now appreciated, sing about my head.

‘Ay, man?  Are ye stench?’ inquired Sim, with a gleam of approval in his wooden countenance.