CHAPTER III

HOW THE COMPANY SPENT THE MORNING AT

CROCLUNE.

HOUGH there was no love lost between Mary Aldour and Flora Robertson, the families were not only on visiting terms, but even Mary saw no reason

why they should not be so. The

Robertsons were neighbours as well as descendants of the clan Donachie-it was a pity that she could not bear with them as Anne did with the most of her provocations, since she could not improve them-but Mary saw no sufficient cause why she should cast a stone at them, point them out to reprobation, or compromise them still more decidedly than they had compromised themselves. (It was only where no previous association existed, or the traditions of her house and country were against a culprit, that Mary was pitilessly implacable.) Thus, when the Robertsons sent down a ghillie cumsrian, or footman, to summon the Aldour young people to a great haymaking on the green of Croclune, and a dance in the evening on the cropped sward, Mary grumbled and got ready,

with her cousin Anne and her young brother Malcolm, and probably, like the most sensible of young girls, was a little glad of the gaiety and only a little sorry that it was to occur at Croclune.

Anne could not conceal her pleasure in going to Croclune, and Mary could hardly blame her for it. If there was a spot of ground lovely beyond all others in the Country it was Croclune. Mary called it a case of the lowland proverb, 'The nearer the kirk the farther from grace,' for she believed its beauty was altogether lost upon the Robertsons except as an attraction to strangers.

Croclune was a rambling thatched cottage, perched on a ledge over the narrow termination of the wide strath into which both Aldour and Finralia opened. But here the strath had thrown off its sober and bountiful character, and broken into extravagance and recklessness. Its rocks were rent and crumpled, and shrivelled and whirled, as if fire-spirits had issued from the bowels of the earth and moulded and grouped them in grim sport, and doubtless fire-spirits had something to do with their conformation. The very land was broken into the most abrupt hollows, the most varied knolls. There was no space for fields within bounds that the eye could reach; the flora that flourished at Croclune consisted of grass and trees; sweet primeval hay was made off these mad, tumbling hillocks; and wood that might have belonged to giants of the forest flourished-sweeping larches, Scotch pines -masts for some high admiral'-ash-trees straight

E

--stemmed, leafy, and full, or with gnarled branches bent, and twisted, and pendent, like the quivering twigs of the birches, and here and there oaks-umbrageous English oaks in the heart of the wild Highlands-all grouped as fancifully as the crags and mounds, standing sentries on this eminence, vanishing down that declivity, waving triumphantly in colossal tufts from the summit of yon jagged pinnacles, or leaning a mossy, hoar, natural bridge over a natural chasm. The wood was not so thick as to hide a broad reach of the strath's river far down below, with leaps —and spouts of its tributary water hurrying down— curving and bending in a water-course parallel to the cottage.

One of the great elements of beauty, where other foundations are not wanting, is the tumult of nature, and the mind on which it makes the liveliest impression is the placid, peaceful constitution, in itself well ordered and sure.

Anne Macdonald was enraptured with Croclune. Mary thought it less sufficing than one's own glen, with its domesticities and ruralities, besides its sublimities. Ben Falloch and Craig Dhu were enough for grandeur. One required in-fields and out-fields, meadow and pasture, herds and flocks, and, above all, people, for home life. A place so romantic as Croclune was very well to go to see, but for a constant dwelling it was like sitting down to sew by moonlight or a beacon signal, or attempting to dance to a clairshach instead of the pipes. The fact was, Croclune

owned the insuperable objection, 'This is no my ain lassie, bonnie though the lassie be;' and poor Mary was troubled by glaring discrepancies between her Ossian and the daily life here. Croclune was peopled by no mighty spirits of the dead or pale shades of those maids who loved and suffered with the great hunters and warriors. Croclune rang to noecho of bossy shield and sounding harp. The Robertsons were not at all like their stately predecessors. Their feats-Captain Robertson's bringing down the last wild goats; Nancy's fishing in the pools (very few gentlewomen had the Amazonian skill and hardness of heart to fish for scaly spoil among Mary Macdonnel's contemporaries), and crossing the ford with her feet drawn up on her side-saddle and the water reaching to her girths; Christie's having climbed the precipice to the Shooter's Point, and hung her white handkerchief from the alder which grew there, as well as in the 'old abbey aisle,' one morning before breakfast, and that to win not so much as ‘a new bonnet' but a pair of muslin gloves ; and Flora Robertson's having kept her appointments with the idle subaltern prior to their clandestine expedition to Inverluig, where the irrevocable knot was so heedlessly, recklessly tied—these were performances which had wonderfully little in common with the tragic deeds of the bow and the spear, the solemn invocations, the mournful cadences, the lofty, monotonous cloud poetry, even in action, of the sons and daughters of the far past. Never mind, Mary, though the world calls it mythological or transcen

dental-Hector and Ulysses, Penelope and Iphigenia, the siege of Troy, the battle of Fingal with Caracalla -the son of the king of the world, formed another study than the bloodless struggles of a ballroom, the flippancy rising occasionally into irony of a London drawing-room, or a country house-or at Rome, or Jerusalem, as the author's fancy flies.

But Croclune was a fine place for a great haymaking, when the weather-given to be capricious and malicious among these magnets of the clouds from June to September, was reasonably propitious. A sweet June day-a sky with pale blue opaque white cloud banks in the morning, with deep blue white fleecy cloud islands at noon, and huge Alps of cumuli rose-dyed in the sunset; and the mountain streams trickling, bickering, and bounding; and the little birds all afloat and full-throated; and the trees stirring constantly, gently waving their gay and green banners, softly bending their young fresh tops. There were patches of bridal Maythorn, too, and golden butterflies of broom, and the first blushing tangled wild roses and gowans, which, though so common and constant all the year round, are seized upon as the signs of summer from the rich Lothians to the black Hebrides—' the gowan's in the glen' mating the westlan winds,' and 'the bonny birken trees' feathered on every spray.

Mary was particularly fond of haymaking in Aldour, when to store the fragrant crop not only all the glen assembled, but the whole family turned out like the Vicar of Wakefield's household. Then Aldour himself,