dragged about with them had fallen from their shoulders. To most people
everything is so uncertain that if they could only see or hear and know
something clear they would drop upon their knees and give thanks. That
was what I felt myself before I found out so strangely, and I was only a
girl. That is why I intend to write this down as well as I can. It will
not be very well done, because I never was clever at all, and always
found it difficult to talk.

I say that perhaps these things could only have happened to me, because,
as I look back over my life, I realize that it has always been a rather
curious one. Even when those who took care of me did not know I was
thinking at all, I had begun to wonder if I were not different from
other children. That was, of course, largely because Muircarrie
Castle was in such a wild and remote part of Scotland that when my few
relations felt they must pay me a visit as a mere matter of duty, their
journey from London, or their pleasant places in the south of England,
seemed to them like a pilgrimage to a sort of savage land; and when a
conscientious one brought a child to play with me, the little civilized
creature was as frightened of me as I was of it. My shyness and fear of
its strangeness made us both dumb. No doubt I seemed like a new breed of
inoffensive little barbarian, knowing no tongue but its own.

A certain clannish etiquette made it seem necessary that a relation
should pay me a visit sometimes, because I was in a way important. The
huge, frowning feudal castle standing upon its battlemented rock was
mine; I was a great heiress, and I was, so to speak, the chieftainess
of the clan. But I was a plain, undersized little child, and had no
attraction for any one but Jean Braidfute, a distant cousin, who took
care of me, and Angus Macayre, who took care of the library, and who was
a distant relative also. They were both like me in the fact that they