the chickens. They gave us of blue, was preparing to feed travelling companion a certain young student who had come to teach a school near by, and finding his scholars all in bed with measles, was anxious to go away again, provided he could get company across the "Great Pass," which was evidently regarded as formidable. I submitted to the course of events, sighed to think of the hole about to be made in my five-pound note, and saw Cathal on his bicycle speeding like the wind to the village shop. He came back after considerable delay with the tyres hanging about him, and informed us that the shop was shut and the owner in bed with influenza, but that, yielding to the urgency of the case, he had sent someone to the rescue with a key, after which Cathal had helped himself. 8 The minister cast one halfwistful glance at the sermonpaper on his desk, and like a muscular Christian offered to help with the bicycle, to which task he and Cathal promptly departed. Alas! it proved to be more of a task than any of us had bargained for. My unhappy steed had lain unused all winter, and the inner and outer tyres of the front wheel had become so glued together that when the former was removed the most hopeless catastrophes happened to the latter. Both indeed were so bad that the minister counselled new ones to be had in this enlightened village at a shop not far away. Meantime we must stay for early dinner-there was no question about that, since it was was now mid-day; and to console us for the delay the minister promised as a Alas! the Fates were against us, and our troubles were only begun. "Somebody blundered," I forget now whether it was Cathal or the minister or the man, and the outer tyre, which was presently being forced with much labour and sweat on to the rim of the wheel, was a size too small! We were loath to admit it, but so it was. At some point in the afternoon's labours I suggested that the tyre being so far not much damaged might be exchanged for another, but I was soon convinced that such a hope was vain. Not only had the owner of the shop influenza, under which circumstances he was little likely to be in goodhumour, but he was-well— not to mention names, he be longed to a religious denomina- though great white banks of tion at the moment violently cloud piled themselves on the at war with our own. It was horizon, there was enough blue clear that it would be useless sky to cheer the most faintto approach him. Cathal, the hearted. Cathal and I have minister, and the Travelling the spirit of adventurers upon Companion who had by this the road; every turn of the time appeared upon the scene, way is a romance, every hillpushed and pulled and levered top suggests an enchanted land till the veins stood out upon beyond, and despite the horrid their foreheads, but all in vain. business of the tyres we rode By four o'clock in the afternoon with light hearts up the long they were obliged to admit that glen, barred at the end by the the task was hopeless, and to great mountains, and leading put on the old tyre ignomini- on somewhere through and ously tied up with string as above the distant fir-woods to it had been the night before, the formidable Pass. For the consoling me with the assur- first couple of hours all went ance that in that district of well, and it was not until after light and civilisation in which we had buried ourselves in the Spa was situated things odoriferous woods and the road would soon be put right. turned sharply uphill that our troubles began. Great snowflakes began to fall till the air was thick with them, and we and the way grew white. had to dismount and climb for miles up a wretched road that seemed as bent on going monotonously up as the devoted youth in the poem of "Excelsior." I remembered a weary friend who once toiled up a mountain side with me. "They say Life is a climb," she remarked with a sigh, "but, oh, I'm glad it's not like this.” The road twisted and turned; we continually saw before us heights that promised to be the summit of the ridge and were not. "If it's a Land of Promise we'll go on, and if it's not a Land of Promise we'll go back," remarked the Travelling Companion on such occasions, and however much it failed to be a "Land of Promise," on we It was now, as I have said, four o'clock, and we had a ride of about forty miles in front of us. The Travelling Companion hesitated, I remember, on the threshold of the Enterprise, speaking of a train he had hoped to catch somewhere over there beyond the mountains, and remarking gloomily that he didn't see how it was to be done in the time. We were not too much daunted, however, by mere considerations of time and distance. One of our wise men Matthew Arnold, I think-credits the Celt with a universal readiness to attempt the impossible. It is hardly to be wondered at that on this occasion we three Celts set out not unhopefully to accomplish the merely improbable. ---- The snow had vanished and the sun was warm, and al went. We reached the top in the end, of course, and fickle Fortune smiled on us for a little from a clear sky as a reward for our endeavours. There was a delicious loneliness on the heights of the Pass. Great tracts of brown heather and bent stretched on either side of us to the mountain walls that shut us in; little lochans looked up at the sky with cold blue eyes and reflected the tall, scanty fir-trees that grew beside them; deer fled at our approach with a soft stir and scampering that was pleasant to hear. Then, in the course of time, our way began to drop downwards, and the wooded fertile straths beyond the watershed lay below us. It was now late, however. The roads had not been all they might have been even on the uplands, my injured steed made slow progress, and the Travelling Companion had ceased to speak in happy metaphors, and seemed to brood gloomily on the train he could no longer hope to catch. Cathal and I pictured the shoemaker's sister, after having prepared a delectable supper, peering anxiously into the dusk for sight of her belated guests. We calculated the number of hours she might be expected to sit up for us, and meditated on the possibilities of reaching our destination before midnight. And then, as the dusk turned into darkness, and we considered that we must be nine miles or so from our destination, that happened which VOL. CXCI.-NO. MCLVII. is always fated to happen in such circumstances-my tyre punctured! I was tired, I was hungry, and I was rather damp, and I said that nothing would induce me to go farther than the nearest inn, which was somewhere in the shadows below us, and to the nearest inn I went, and stayed there all by myself, while my companions, who had agreed to share the same quarters for the night, and who were lured by the thought of the anxiety and the supper of the shoemaker's sister, sped away from me into the darkness. To them belong the further adventures of the night, and when next day I listened to Cathal's account of them I thought they savoured at one point of some Lost Land of Faerie. The travellers lost their way in a labyrinth of lonely roads, and after riding hither and thither, and feeling very tired and hungry, they saw, some time after midnight, a light in a hollow. down into the hollow, they discovered there an imposinglooking house, and having hammered upon a door they were admitted by a charming boy to a hall where lovely ladies in green silk and hats directed them upon their way. Going "Green silk and hats!" said I incredulously. "Hats! at that time of night!" Cathal was positive. "They were very, very beautiful," he said thoughtfully. "They wore green silk and hatsI'm sure about the hats. I wonder if there would be any 2 A chance of finding that house again." I led him away from vain speculation to the history of how he found the house of the sister of the shoemaker. "Well," he went on, "it was very awkward at first about that. I didn't know the name of her house-I forgot to ask you for it; and I wasn't sure what her own name was -whether she was married, or what. I remembered about that when we were hunting for X-, and when I told he was rather gloomy for a while. Afterwards I remembered her name, so it was all right. They said her house was near the Free Church. We got there between one and two sometime. There were lots of churches. I climbed over the gates of several, and lighted matches and looked at the notice-boards to see which was Free. We tried two or three wrong houses, but we found it in the end. She put her head out of the window. She gave us supper, and was awfully decent." He paused and looked meditative. "It was lucky we saw that light in the hollow," he added. "Cathal," said I solemnly, "it looks to me as if that light was a fairy light. There used to be lots of fairies hereabouts. That house doesn't sound like a real house, and these green people!-it's pretty plain, I think. The wonder is they didn't direct you into a morass where your bones would be found bleached white a hundred years afterwards." Cathal smiled. "The house was next the Free Church,” said he. "Do you think any spell would stand that?" All's well that ends well. Fairies or no fairies, we had reached the Spa. reached the Spa. My bones ached a good deal, it is true, but I went with a good heart to the pump-room and began drinking the waters. Only the protection of a strict anonymity would induce me to describe further the first chapter of my "cure." It was all, as I can see now, so extremely foolish. All my life I had been more or less indifferent to wind and weather. I had walked and rowed and fished and climbed mountains in rain or storm, and nothing alarming had ever happened. It did not occur to me that because of a few rheumatic aches anything III. alarming would be likely to happen now. For ten days or so Cathal and I enjoyed a pleasant holiday, and got in as much bicycling as possible between the hours at which it was necessary to drink the exceedingly unpleasant waters for which X- is famous. The season had not yet begun, and we Highland folk had the place pretty much to ourselves. There were as yet no English day. invalids to fill the big hotels expected to get home in one and be wakened in the early morning by the exhilarating strains of the bagpipes. In the pump-room Gaelic was spoken freely, as stiff-jointed shepherds compared notes with their fellows and called over the counter for glasses of an unwonted beverage. From the daily papers we learned that a sudden severe snowstorm had descended upon the country, and we regarded ourselves as fortunate because X— was one of the few distriots in the whole of Scotland to escape it. From the west we heard of torrents of rain that followed the snow, and washed away all traces of what had been a heavy fall. As we were to discover later, all this was dismissed too lightly from our minds. When our short stay at the Spa came to an end, the results of my diligent attendance at the pump-room were not quite what I had anticipated. I could, indeed, only congratulate myself on having reached the first stage referred to in the oft-repeated legend that when one is taking a "cure" one feels worse to begin with and better afterwards. We had decided to return by a different route from the one by which we had come, so that while on our outward journey we had ridden south and then east, covering two sides of a square, we should now go north and then west, and so complete the figure. By taking the train for the north-going portion of our journey we It was a Saturday morning when we left the Spa, fine and bright and warm. Fortune, however, on this tour did not so much favour as lure us. No sooner were we irrevocably on. our way than the sky clouded, and a soft wetting rain began to fall, so that by the time we left the railway and set out on our fifty-mile ride across the mountains, it was into a grey, moist, misty world we went. Unfortunately we had in a manner burnt our boats behind us. Most of our modest luggage we had sent home by parcel post, so that once we became wet we could not with comfort halt at any half-way house; we had left the region of telegraph offices behind us, and could not now send any word ahead of a change in our plans; and, finally, it was Saturday, and did we spend one night at a wayside inn, we must perforce spend two, for in our country we are of the straitest sect of the Sabbatarians. Even to make too early a start on a Monday morning is looked upon with suspicion in our village, such a proceeding suggesting dire possibilities of Sabbath packing. "I did not pack on Sunday, I packed on Saturday night," wrote a lady of our parish in large letters on a post - card, when thus aspersed. But although the post card was evidently intended for public perusal, I do not know whether the doubts as to her |