“Where did you learn that, Alice?” inquired Hardy gently, as his wife concluded these lines, which she murmured rather than pronounced, as she leaned back in the boat looking down into the water, and rippling it with her delicate fingers.
“It is in Hogg’s ‘Kilmeny,’” she answered. “You don’t know the poem, Arthur, but we will read it some day. Kilmeny was taken away to the spirit-land, and allowed to revisit her native Scotland, to show what a woman can be and what she can do.”
“And did she take you with her, Alice?” said her husband.
Mrs Hardy’s cheek glowed at the implied compliment.
Soon they entered the little stream which Mr Stewart had pointed out to them, and truly it was a lovely scene. Although evidently deep, the water was so transparently clear that each pebble and fibre of weed was distinctly seen. Trees arched overhead, hanging at times so far across the stream that it was difficult to manage the oars. Where it widened, little islands, covered with trees, ferns, and wild-flowers, broke it into still narrower channels, forming leafy vistas, occasionally terminating in the blue hills.
“Oh, what is that?” exclaimed Helen, as a large bird rose with heavy flight from a point of land which they were approaching.
“Hech! yon’s ta bhird,” commenced one of the rowers, with great animation; then, checked by the consciousness that, however well he might be supplied with information regarding the bird, he could not communicate it in English, he continued in a more subdued tone, “Yon’s ta bhird ye may often see nigh ta wather.”
The heron, for such it was, continued to precede them up the stream, resting on a point of land till they came close to it, and then majestically and gloomily rising, to alight again. In about an hour the boat touched a sandy beach, surrounded with magnificent chestnut trees, amongst which the stream still ran, but so shallow and rocky a’s to be unnavigable.
“And, now, are we in Glen Bogie?” asked Helen.
“Ay, ye may say that,” said the man who had before spoken.