I. AT HERMISTON


THE road to Hermiston runs for a great part of the way up the valley of
a stream, a favourite with anglers and with midges, full of falls and
pools, and shaded by willows and natural woods of birch. Here and
there, but at great distances, a byway branches off, and a gaunt
farmhouse may be descried above in a fold of the hill; but the more part
of the time, the road would be quite empty of passage and the hills of
habitation. Hermiston parish is one of the least populous in Scotland;
and, by the time you came that length, you would scarce be surprised at
the inimitable smallness of the kirk, a dwarfish, ancient place seated
for fifty, and standing in a green by the burn-side among two-score
gravestones. The manse close by, although no more than a cottage, is
surrounded by the brightness of a flower-garden and the straw roofs of
bees; and the whole colony, kirk and manse, garden and graveyard, finds
harbourage in a grove of rowans, and is all the year round in a great
silence broken only by the drone of the bees, the tinkle of the burn,
and the bell on Sundays. A mile beyond the kirk the road leaves the
valley by a precipitous ascent, and brings you a little after to the
place of Hermiston, where it comes to an end in the back-yard before the
coach-house. All beyond and about is the great field, of the hills; the
plover, the curlew, and the lark cry there; the wind blows as it blows
in a ship's rigging, hard and cold and pure; and the hill-tops huddle
one behind another like a herd of cattle into the sunset.

The house was sixty years old, unsightly, comfortable; a farmyard and a