My tall host knocked the ashes from his pipe, and crossing one leg over the other looked into the fire.

Outside, the wind howled in the trees, and the rain beat upon the window-panes. The firelight flickered on the grate, falling upon the polished furniture of the low-roofed, old-fashioned library, with its high Georgian overmantel, where in a deep recess there stood a clock, shaped like a cross, with eighteenth-century cupids carved in ivory fluttering round the base, and Time with a long scythe standing upon one side.

In the room hung the scent of an old country-house, compounded of so many samples that it is difficult to enumerate them all. Beeswax and potpourri of roses, damp, and the scent of foreign woods in the old cabinets, tobacco and wood smoke, with the all-pervading smell of age, were some of them. The result was not unpleasant, and seemed the complement of the well-bound Georgian books standing demure upon their shelves, the blackening family portraits, and the skins of red deer and of roe scattered about the room.

The conversation languished, and we both sat listening to the storm that seemed to fill the world with noises strange and unearthly, for the house was far from railways, and the avenues that lead to it were long and dark. The solitude and the wild night seemed to have recreated the old world, long lost, and changed, but still remembered in that district just where the Highlands and the Lowlands meet.

At such times and in such houses the country really seems country once again, and not the gardened, game-keepered mixture of shooting ground and of fat fields tilled by machinery to which men now and then resort for sport, or to gather in their rents, with which the whole world is familiar to-day.

My host seemed to be struggling with himself to tell me something, and as I looked at him, tall, strong, and upright, his face all mottled by the weather, his homespun coat, patched on the shoulders with buckskin that once had been white, but now was fawn-coloured with wet and from the chafing of his gun, I felt the parturition of his speech would probably cost him a shrewd throe. So I said nothing, and he, after having filled his pipe, ramming the tobacco down with an old silver Indian seal, made as he told me in Kurachi, and brought home by a great-uncle fifty years ago, slowly began to speak, not looking at me, but as it were delivering his thoughts aloud, almost unconsciously, looking now and then at me as if he felt, rather than knew, that I was there. As he spoke, the tall, stuffed hen-harrier; the little Neapolitan shrine in tortoiseshell and coral, set thick with saints; the flying dragons from Ceylon, spread out like butterflies in a glazed case; the “poor’s-box” on the shelf above the books with its four silver sides adorned with texts; the rows of blue books, and of Scott’s Novels (the Roxburgh edition), together with the scent exuding from the Kingwood cabinet; the sprays of white Scotch rose, outlined against the window blinds; and the sporting prints and family tree, all neatly framed in oak, created the impression of being in a world remote, besquired and cut off from the century in which we live by more than fifty years. Upon the rug before the fire the sleeping spaniel whined uneasily, as if, though sleeping, it still scented game, and all the time the storm roared in the trees and whistled down the passages of the lone country house. One saw in fancy, deep in the recesses of the woods, the roe stand sheltering, and the capercailzie sitting on the branches of the firs, wet and dejected, like chickens on a roost, and little birds sent fluttering along, battling for life against the storm. Upon such nights, in districts such as that in which the gaunt old house was situated, there is a feeling of compassion for the wild things in the woods that, stealing over one, bridges the gulf between them and ourselves in a mysterious way. Their lot and sufferings, joys, loves, and the epitome of their brief lives, come home to us with something irresistible, making us feel that our superiority is an unreal thing, and that in essentials we are one.

My host went on: “Some time ago I walked up to the little moor that overlooks the Clyde, from which you see ships far off lying at the Tail of the Bank, the smoke of Greenock and Port Glasgow, the estuary itself, though miles away, looking like a sheet of frosted silver or dark-grey steel, according to the season, and in the distance the range of hills called Argyle’s Bowling Green, with the deep gap that marks the entrance to the Holy Loch. Autumn had just begun to tinge the trees, birches were golden, and rowans red, the bents were brown and dry. A few bog asphodels still showed amongst the heather, and bilberries, dark as black currants, grew here and there amongst the carpet of green sphagnum and the stag’s-head moss. The heather was all rusty brown, but still there was, as it were, a recollection of the summer in the air. Just the kind of day you feel inclined to sit down on the lee side of a dry-stone dyke, and smoke and look at some familiar self-sown birch that marks the flight of time, as you remember that it was but a year or two ago that it had first shot up above the grass.

“I remember two or three plants of tall hemp-agrimony still had their flower heads withered on the stalk, giving them a look of wearing wigs, and clumps of ragwort still had a few bees buzzing about them, rather faintly, with a belated air. I saw all this—not that I am a botanist, for you know I can hardly tell the difference between the CruciferÆ and the UmbelliferÆ, but because when you live in the country some of the common plants seem to obtrude themselves upon you, and you have got to notice them in spite of you. So I walked on till I came to a wrecked plantation of spruce and of Scotch fir. A hurricane had struck it, turning it over almost in rows, as it was planted. The trees had withered in most cases, and in the open spaces round their upturned roots hundreds of rabbits burrowed, and had marked the adjoining field with little paths, just like the lines outside a railway-station.

“I saw all this, not because I looked at it, for if you look with the idea of seeing everything, commonly everything escapes you, but because the lovely afternoon induced a feeling of well-being and contentment, and everything seemed to fall into its right proportion, so that you saw first the harmonious whole, and then the salient points most worth the looking at.

“I walked along feeling exhilarated with the autumn air and the fresh breeze that blew up from the Clyde. I remember thinking I had hardly ever felt greater content, and as I walked it seemed impossible the world could be so full of rank injustice, or that the lot of three-fourths of its population could really be so hard. A pack of grouse flew past, skimming above the heather, as a shoal of flying-fish skims just above the waves. I heard their quacking cries as they alighted on some stooks of oats, and noticed that the last bird to settle was an old hen, and that, even when all were down, I still could see her head, looking out warily above the yellow grain. Beyond the ruined wood there came the barking of a shepherd’s dog, faint and subdued, and almost musical.

“I sat so long, smoking and looking at the view, that when I turned to go the sun was sinking and our long, northern twilight almost setting in.

“You know it,” said my host, and I, who often had read by its light in summer and the early autumn, nodded assent, wondering to myself what he was going to tell me, and he went on.

“It has the property of making all things look a little ghostly, deepening the shadows and altering their values, so that all that you see seems to acquire an extra significance, not so much to the eye as to the mind. Slowly I retraced my steps, walking under the high wall of rough piled stones till it ends, at the copse of willows, on the north side of the little moor to which I had seen the pack of grouse fly after it had left the stooks. I crossed into it, and began to walk towards home, knee-deep in bent grass and dwarf willows, with here and there a patch of heather and a patch of bilberries. The softness of the ground so dulled my footsteps that I appeared to walk as lightly as a roe upon the spongy surface of the moor. As I passed through a slight depression in which the grass grew rankly, I heard a wild cry coming, as it seemed, from just beneath my feet. Then came a rustling in the grass, and a large, dark-grey bird sprang out, repeating the wild cry, and ran off swiftly, trailing a broken wing.“It paused upon a little hillock fifty yards away, repeating its strange note, and looking round as if it sought for something that it was certain was at hand. High in the air the cry, wilder and shriller, was repeated, and a great grey bird that I saw was a whaup slowly descended in decreasing circles, and settled down beside its mate.

“They seemed to talk, and then the wounded bird set off at a swift run, its fellow circling above its head and uttering its cry as if it guided it. I watched them disappear, feeling as if an iron belt was drawn tight round my heart, their cries growing fainter as the deepening shadows slowly closed upon the moor.”

My host stopped, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and turning to me, said:—

“I watched them go to what of course must have been certain death for one of them, furious, with the feelings of a murderer towards the man whose thoughtless folly had been the cause of so much misery. Curse him! I watched them, impotent to help, for as you know the curlew is perhaps the wildest of our native birds; and even had I caught the wounded one to set its wing, it would have pined and died. One thing I could have done, had I but had a gun and had the light been better, I might have shot them both, and had I done so I would have buried them beside each other.

“That’s what I had upon my mind to tell you. I think the storm and the wild noises of the struggling trees outside have brought it back to me, although it happened years ago. Sometimes, when people talk about fidelity, saying it is not to be found upon the earth, I smile, for I have seen it with my own eyes, and manifest, out on that little moor.”

He filled his pipe, and sitting down in an old leather chair, much worn and rather greasy, silently gazed into the fire.

I, too, was silent, thinking upon the tragedy; then feeling that something was expected of me, looked up and murmured, “Yes.”