Flora was a native of a rich pastoral country; very beautiful in running brooks, smooth meadows, and majestic parks; where the fat sleek cattle so celebrated in the London markets, graze knee-deep in luxuriant pastures, and the fallow deer browse and gambol beneath the shadow of majestic oaks through the long bright summer days. She had never seen a mountain before her visit to the North, in her life; had never risen higher in the world than to the top of Shooter’s Hill; and when they arrived at the foot of this grand upheaving of nature, she began to think the task more formidable than she had imagined at a distance. Her young conductor, agile as a kid, bounded up the steep acclivity with as much ease as if he was running over a bowling-green.
“Not so fast, Jim!” cried Flora, pausing to draw breath. “I cannot climb like you.”
Jim was already beyond hearing, and was lying on the ground peering over a projecting crag at least two hundred feet above her head, and impishly laughing at the slow progress she made.
“Now Jim! that’s cruel of you, to desert me in my hour of need,” said Flora, shaking her hand at the young mad-cap. “Lyndsay was right after all. I had better have waited till to-morrow.”
Meanwhile, the path that wound round the mountain towards the summit became narrower and narrower, and the ascent more steep and difficult. Flora sat down upon a stone amid the ruins of the chapel to rest, and to enjoy the magnificent prospect. The contemplation of this sublime panorama for a while absorbed every other feeling. She was only alive to a keen sense of the beautiful; and while her eye rested on the lofty ranges of mountains to the north and south, or upon the broad bosom of the silver Forth, she no longer wondered at the enthusiastic admiration expressed by the bards of Scotland for their romantic land.
While absorbed in thought, and contrasting the present with the past, a lovely boy of four years of age, in kilt and hose, his golden curls flying in the wind, ran at full speed up the steep side of the hill; a panting woman, without bonnet or shawl, following hard upon his track, shaking her fist at him, and vociferating her commands (doubtless for him to return) in Gaelic, fled by.
On ran the laughing child, the mother after him; but as well might a giant pursue a fairy.
Flora followed the path they had taken, and was beginning to enjoy the keen bracing air of the hills, when she happened to cast her eyes to the far-off meadows beneath. Her head grew suddenly giddy, and she could not divest herself of the idea, that one false step would send her to the plains below. Here was a most ridiculous and unromantic position: she neither dared to advance nor retreat; and she stood grasping a ledge of the rocky wall in an agony of cowardice and irresolution. At this critical moment, the mother of the run-away child returned panting from the higher ledge of the mountain, and, perceiving Flora pale and trembling, very kindly stopped and asked what ailed her.
Flora could not help laughing while she confessed her fears, lest she should fall from the narrow footpath on which she stood. The woman, though evidently highly amused at her distress, had too much native kindliness of heart, which is the mother of genuine politeness, to yield to the merriment which hovered about her lips.
“Ye are na accustomed to the hills,” she said, in her northern dialect, “or ye wa’d na dread a hillock like this. Ye suld ha’ been born whar I wa’ born, to ken a mountain fra’ a mole-hill. There is my bairn, noo, I canna’ keep him fra’ the mountain. He will gang awa’ to the tap, an’ only laughs at me when I spier to him to come doon. It’s a’ because he is sae weel begotten—an’ all his forbears war reared amang the hills.”