Mina went with us on almost every occasion. She was a strong and wiry little Highland maiden, as well as beautiful. I must say that she could fish as well as either Captain Reeves or I, and had a neat little gun with which she could bring down her bird on sight.

The birds were now getting wild and scarce, however, but the scenery and the delightful fresh air were worth a king’s ransom. I felt getting stronger every day, and I was now sun-browned as to knees and face. And only healthy men do tan.

Well, on these shooting excursions there was invariably a good lunch-basket to fall back upon. This was carried by the pony, which we made Mina mount and ride whenever she looked in the least degree tired.

The pony was led by a bare-legged, ragged-kilted ghillie. I used to wonder how he escaped sunstroke or the bite of an adder; for he wore no cap, and I have seen him crossing a piece of withered grass in which the snakes were wriggling and racing in every direction.

But Kennie had no fear.

When I had been little over a month in the strath, seeing the captain almost every day, both at the manse and at his own house, he told me a story that made me stare in astonishment, and believe myself back once more in the old, old days of romance, and of wild adventure by sea and land.

CHAPTER III.
THE ISLES OF THE BEAUTIFUL WEST.

“Strange—that where Nature loved to trace,
As if for gods, a dwelling-place,
And every charm and grace hath mixed
Within the paradise she fixed,
There man, enamoured of distress,
Should mar it into wilderness,
And trample, brute-like, o’er each flower,
That tasks not one laborious hour.”—Byron.

IT was one bright, beautiful afternoon, when we were alone together, far away on a lonesome, heather-clad hill-top. It was a hill that, south of the silvery Tweed, would have been called a mountain, yet as regards height was nowhere amid the chaos of giants with which it was everywhere surrounded.

This hill, however, was beautifully encrimsoned with heath and heather. The former floated over the rocks in vast red sheets: the latter, more sturdy and strong, looked boldly upwards to face the sunlit sky.