quietly back into the water with the hook still set in his nose. A few
minutes afterwards I brought him within reach of the gaff, and my first
salmon was glittering on the grass beside me.

Then I remembered that William Black had described this very fish in
A Princess of Thule. I pulled the book from my pocket, and, lighting a
pipe, sat down to read that delightful chapter over again. The breeze
played softly down the valley. The warm sunlight was filled with the
musical hum of insects and the murmur of falling waters. I thought how
much pleasanter it would have been to learn salmon-fishing, as Black's
hero did, from the Maid of Borva, than from a red-headed gillie. But,
then, his salmon, after leaping across the stream, got away; whereas
mine was safe. A man cannot have everything in this world. I picked a
spray of rosy bell-heather from the bank of the river, and pressed it
between the leaves of the book in memory of Sheila.


II.

COMMON HEATHER.


It is not half as far from Albany to Aberdeen as it is from New York
to London. In fact, I venture to say that an American on foot will find
himself less a foreigner in Scotland than in any other country in
the Old World. There is something warm and hospitable--if he knew the
language well enough he would call it couthy--in the greeting that he
gets from the shepherd on the moor, and the conversation that he holds
with the farmer's wife in the stone cottage, where he stops to ask for a
drink of milk and a bit of oat-cake. He feels that there must be a drop