It was long before I was old enough to be told anything like this that I began to feel that the moor was in secret my companion and friend, that it was not only the moot to me, but something else.  It was like a thing alive—­a huge giant lying spread out in the sun warming itself, or covering itself with thick, white mist which sometimes writhed and twisted itself into wraiths.  First I noticed and liked it some day, perhaps, when it was purple and yellow with gorse and heather and broom, and the honey scents drew bees and butterflies and birds.  But soon I saw and was drawn by another thing.

How young was I that afternoon when I sat in the deep window and watched the low, soft whiteness creeping out and hovering over the heather as if the moor had breathed it?  I do not remember.  It was such a low little mist at first; and it crept and crept until its creeping grew into something heavier and whiter, and it began to hide the heather and the gorse and broom, and then the low young fir-trees.  It mounted and mounted, and sometimes a breath of wind twisted it into weird shapes, almost like human creatures.  It opened and closed again, and then it dragged and crept and grew thicker.  And as I pressed my face against the window-pane, it mounted still higher and got hold of the moor and hid it, hanging heavy and white and waiting.  That was what came into my child mind:  that it had done what the moor had told it to do; had hidden things which wanted to be hidden, and then it waited.

Strangers say that Muircarrie moor is the most beautiful and the most desolate place in the world, but it never seemed desolate to me.  From my first memory of it I had a vague, half-comforted feeling that there was some strange life on it one could not exactly see, but was always conscious of.  I know now why I felt this, but I did not know then.

If I had been older when I first began to see what I did see there, I should no doubt have read things in books which would have given rise in my mind to doubts and wonders; but I was only a little child who had lived a life quite apart from the rest of the world.  I was too silent by nature to talk and ask questions, even if I had had others to talk to.  I had only Jean and Angus, and, as I found out years later, they knew what I did not, and would have put me off with adroit explanations if I had been curious.  But I was not curious.  I accepted everything as it came and went.

CHAPTER II

I only six when Wee Brown Elspeth was brought to me.  Jean and Angus were as fond of each other in their silent way as they were of me, and they often went together with me when I was taken out for my walks.  I was kept in the open air a great deal, and Angus would walk by the side of my small, shaggy Shetland pony and lead him over rough or steep places.  Sheltie, the pony, was meant for use when we wished to fare farther than a child could walk; but I was