ways and the ways of the whole sex in the country-side, no one better;
when they did not go barefoot, they wore stout "rig and furrow" woollen
hose of an invisible blue mostly, when they were not black outright; and
Dandie, at sight of this daintiness, put two and two together. It was a
silk handkerchief, then they would be silken hose; they matched - then
the whole outfit was a present of Clem's, a costly present, and not
something to be worn through bog and briar, or on a late afternoon of
Sunday. He whistled. "My denty May, either your heid's fair turned, or
there's some ongoings!" he observed, and dismissed the subject.

She went slowly at first, but ever straighter and faster for the
Cauldstaneslap, a pass among the hills to which the farm owed its name.
The Slap opened like a doorway between two rounded hillocks; and through
this ran the short cut to Hermiston. Immediately on the other side it
went down through the Deil's Hags, a considerable marshy hollow of the
hill tops, full of springs, and crouching junipers, and pools where the
black peat-water slumbered. There was no view from here. A man might
have sat upon the Praying Weaver's stone a half century, and seen none
but the Cauldstaneslap children twice in the twenty-four hours on their
way to the school and back again, an occasional shepherd, the irruption
of a clan of sheep, or the birds who haunted about the springs, drinking
and shrilly piping. So, when she had once passed the Slap, Kirstie was
received into seclusion. She looked back a last time at the farm. It
still lay deserted except for the figure of Dandie, who was now seen to
be scribbling in his lap, the hour of expected inspiration having come
to him at last. Thence she passed rapidly through the morass, and came
to the farther end of it, where a sluggish burn discharges, and the path
for Hermiston accompanies it on the beginning of its downward path.
From this corner a wide view was opened to her of the whole stretch of
braes upon the other side, still sallow and in places rusty with the