But she has knocked down a cone. It is still green, but somehow the sight of it takes me far away north to bonnie Scotland, and I am roaming, a boy once more, on a wild moorland, where grow, here and there, tiny pine-trees—seedlings, that owe their habitat, if not existence, to the rooks, who have carried cones like these from the forests. Like Byron, “I rove a young Highlander o’er the dark heath.”
“I arise with the dawn, with my dog as my guide,
From mountain to mountain I’m bounding along,
I am breasting the billows of Dee’s rushing tide,
And hear at a distance the Highlander’s song.”
I close my eyes, and it all comes back, that wild and desolate but dearly-loved scene; the banks where lizards bask; the “pots” and the ponds in that broad moor, where teal-ducks swim, and near which the laughing snipe has her nest; I hear the wild whistle of the whaup or curlew, and the checker of the stone-hatch in the cairn. I am wading among crimson heath and purple heather, where the crowberry and cranberry grow in patches of green. And now I have wandered away to the deep, dark forest itself; and near to a kelpie’s pool, by the banks of a stream, I lay me down to rest. There are myriads of bees in the lime-trees above, through which the sunshine shimmers, lighting up the leaves to a tenderer green, but the bees begin to talk, and the murmuring stream begins to sing, and presently I find myself in Elfin-land, in the very midst of a fairy revel.
The “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a masterpiece of art, but nothing to this. That was a mere phantasy; this is a reality. This is—
“Pa! papa!”
I start up. I am still in my woodland study. But a sweet young face is bending over me, and tender eyes are looking into mine.
“Pa, dear, how sound you have been asleep! Do you know it is nearly sunset?”
“Have I? Is it?” I reply, smiling. “I thought, Ida, you were queen of Elfin-land.”
It is my tiny daughter who has come toddling up to the wood to seek for me.
Three minutes after this, we are tooling down the hill homewards, and Ida—my own little queen of the elves—is seated on the cycle beside me.