The humour of the Scot 'neath northern lights and ... - Electric Scotland

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WHISKY STORIES 221
sponge. The wind, for August, cut keen, and chilled
the heated frame—heated by a toilsome plunge through
tangled
heather and spongy moss, up Battock's hoary
flank. My butt is No. 1 at the extreme end of the
line.
Different this to the line of elephants on the Koosee
Dyaras. Below me sits my cousin George, wiry, keen,
with a look of
the eagle about him, which thirty years'
active life in South America has perhaps not tended to
subdue. Next to him my cousin David, grizzled now
and lined to what I remember him when we made that
famous march to Ballater in the year—what was it ?
Ah, me ! how the long procession of the years lengthens
out as I try to recall that wild excursion. Here we
three meet again in the same glen, after more than
thirty years of severance and perilous adventure and
arduous toil, and, thank God, some solid reward for it
too, and a full survival of the old kindly affection and
mutual trust.
How still it is !
Nought but the sough of the cuttingwind
; the plaintive bleating of some distant sheep
a plover's melancholy cry ; the twitter of a restless
ouzel who flits from rock to rock at fitful intervals,
setting my nerves on jar, and making me clutch my
gun in the momentarily recurring belief
that here come
the expected grouse at last. Down the hill, still
further, I can just discern the gray suit of one of the
kindliest natures and most genial gentlemen who ever
tramped the heather. He hails from distant Cuba, and
every one dubs him ' the General ' : I suppose because
he is a general favourite, for, bar his moustachios and
imperial, there is nothing now aggressively military
about him. Yet there was a time when the Spaniards