My companion was bound northward by the next train in that direction, and was sure to find good quarters for the night; but as there was not an inn for ten miles on the route I was to travel, and as it was now quite night and the road mostly houseless and lonely, I felt some anxiety about my own lodging.  But on inquiry I was very glad to find that one of the two beds in the room was unoccupied and at my disposal.  So, having accompanied my fellow-traveller to the station and seen him off with mutual good wishes, I returned to the cottage, and the mistress replenished the fire with a new supply of chips and faggots, and I had two or three hours of rare enjoyment, enhanced by some interesting books I found on a shelf by the window.  And this is a fact worthy of note and full of good meaning.  You will seldom find a cottage in Scotland, however poor and small, without a shelf of books in it.  I retired rather earlier than usual; but before I fell asleep, the two regular lodgers, who occupied the other bed, came in softly, and spoke in a suppressed tone, as if reluctant to awaken me.  And here I was much impressed with another fact affiliated with the one I have mentioned—­that of praying as well as reading in the Scotch cottage.  After a little conversation just above a whisper, the elder of the two—­and he not twenty, while the other was apparently only sixteen—­first read, with full Scotch accent, one of the hard-rhymed psalms used in the Scotch service.  Then, after a short pause, he read with a low, solemn voice a chapter in the Bible.  A few minutes of silence succeeded, as if a wordless prayer was going upward upon the still wings of thought, which made no audible beating in their flight.  It was very impressive; an incident that I shall ever hold among the most interesting of all I met with on my walk.  They were not brothers evidently, but most likely strangers thrown together on the railroad.  They doubtless came from different directions, but, from Highlands or Lowlands, they came from Bible-lighted homes, whose “voices of the night” were blended with the breathings of religious life and instruction.  Separated from such homes, they had agreed to make this one after the same spiritual pattern, barring the parental presence and teaching.

The next day after breakfast, took leave of my kind cottage hosts, exchanging good wishes for mutual happiness.  Went out of the amphitheatre of Strathspey by a gateway into another, surrounded by mountains less lofty and entirely covered with heather.  For several miles beyond Carr Bridge I passed over the wildest moorland.  The road was marked by posts about ten feet high, painted white within two feet of the top and black above.  These are planted about fifteen rods apart, to guide the traveller in the drifting and blinding snows of winter.  The road over this cold, desolate waste exceeded anything I ever saw in America, even in the most fashionable suburbs of New York and Boston.  It was as smooth and hard