The Pirate's Gold

It was autumn—autumn, that is, as we reckon the seasons in the Scottish Highlands. For August was wellnigh at a close. The heather, it is true, still bloomed crimson and red on the mountain sides and the beautiful braes, but the days were now appreciably shorter, and hot though they might be during the day, soon after the sun went down,

“And left the red clouds to preside o’er the scene,”

the winds felt chilly, and sometimes a little raw.

This particular evening was no exception, and darkness came on a full hour sooner, with no moon and never a star to light me from the hill where I had lingered, with my beautiful Gordon setter Dash, longer than usual. I did not care to return without a fairly good bag, and the birds on the bit of shooting I called mine were getting a little wild.

I was living with the minister of Glen T—— in Ross-shire. He was an old man, and did not care to go to the hill much himself. “The scenery all around,” he used to say smiling, “is good enough for me, and I mean to live and die here without ever leaving the glen again.”

Well might he have said the scenery was good enough for him. I have never seen wilder or more beautiful in any part of the world. Had you climbed a high hill, you would have said it was a chaos of mountains; but all between these were braes clad in silver drooping birch, with here and there a patch of dark and solemn pine wood, the abode of hawks and crows, with many a bird of prey besides. Higher up was the crimson heather, while patches of snow were to be seen in clefts and hollows highest of all, and this snow never left.

But it was the multitude of small lochs or lakes that would have struck you as most marvellous of all. Not a glen that had not two or three of these, with perhaps silver streams between, and torrents or cataracts roaring down the mountain sides—the marvel being where the water came from. At times, indeed, it appeared to roll out of the very sky itself.

Well, it was late before I fired my final cartridge, and by a fluke, for I had not aimed, bagged my last bird.

Then Dash and I started on our long journey to the manse. Ten miles if a foot; but I knew the road well, and had known it from boyhood. I had been since then all over the world, and had more wild adventures than I may ever be able to describe in print; still I remembered the road, or—I believed I did. English fields and meadows may change in a few years into towns and streets, but the everlasting hills are the same for ages.