But the fifth made no sound.
We were close to the cliff, and it had gone over. I tried the experiment again and again to make sure; then turning directly off to the right, was overjoyed at finding the foot-way. In no part of the way down could we have been farther from this black, wet precipice than four or five yards. But the stones I threw kept us safe, and we were soon down and in a bonnie, bosky dell at the foot.
* * * * *
It has been my lot and luck in life, all through so far, to get every now and then mixed up with strange adventures. People who do me the honour to read my books often give me credit for an inventive faculty when no such credit is deserved. My drawers are filled with piles of old log-books detailing scenes and incidents that I have been mixed up in, so that I really have not to depend on imagination for my facts, as many other writers have. This is the advantage of having been a sailor, and of being still a wanderer and a rover. But little did I think to-night that my having taken that short cut would give me subject-matter for so strange—because true—a story as that which I am now writing.
Let me call the wooded dingle in which I now stood with dog and gun Glen Foogle, because that is not its name. It was a bonnie wee glen when I knew it before, and that was long, long ago. There were some green, cultivated fields here that were then let as a farm to old Donal’ Graat, who kept a few cows and a sheepie or two, and was content to live and die in that long, low, thatched hut, as his fathers had done before him.
The fields bordered a beautiful little loch of water, so brown that even the fish caught here were as red in flesh as a salmon, and many a dozen I had lifted out of it.
Clumps of dark pine trees and weeping birches were everywhere.
I had no idea that any great change had been made in this wee glen. I had heard that old Donal’ was dead, and that his son had grown up from a tow-haired, bare-headed, kilted laddie, to a tall and stalwart young man, and had enlisted into the “gallant Forty-twa;” but that was all.
In Tam o’ Shanter’s memorable ride
“As he frae Ayr ae nicht did canter,”