The air stayed smiling and sweet.  In a town half mountain, half plain, he made friends at the inn with Don Fernando, son of an ancient, proud, decaying house, poor as poverty.  Don Fernando had been in Paris, knew by hearsay England, and had heard Scotland mentioned.  Spaniard and Scot drank together.  The former was drawn into almost love of Ian.  Here was a help against boundless ennui!  Ian and his horse, and the small mail strapped behind the saddle, finally went off with Don Fernando to spend a week in his old house on the hillside just without the town.  Here was poverty also, but yet sufficient acres to set a table and pour good wine and to make the horse forget the famine road behind him.  Here were lounging and siesta, rest for body and mind, sweet “do well a very little!” Don Fernando would have kept the guest a second week and then a third.

But Ian shook his head, laughed, embraced him, promised a return of good when the great stream made it possible, and set forth upon his further travel.  The horse looked sleek, almost fat.  The Scot’s jaded wardrobe was cleaned, mended, refreshed.  Living with Don Fernando were an elder sister and an ancient cousin who had fallen in love with the big, handsome Don, traveling so oddly.  These had set hand-maidens to work, with the result that Ian felt himself spruce as a newly opened pink.  And Don Fernando gave him a traveling-cloak—­very fine—­a last year’s gift, it seemed, from a grandee he had obliged.  Cold weather was approaching and its warmth would be grateful.  Ian’s great need was for money in purse.  These new friends had so little of that that he chose not to ask for a loan.  After all, he could sell the cloak!

The day was fine, the country mounting as it were by stairs toward the mountains.  Before him climbed a string of pack-mules.  The merchant owning them and their lading traveled with a guard of stout young men.  For some hours Ian had the merchant for companion and heard much of the woes of the region and the times, the miseries of travel, the cursed inns, bandits licensed and unlicensed, craft, violence, and robbery!  The merchant bewailed all life and kept a hawk eye upon his treasure on the Spanish road.  At last he and his guard, his mules and muleteers, turned aside into a skirting way that would bring him to a town visible at no great distance.  Left alone, Ian viewed from a hilltop the roofs of this place, with a tower or two starting up like warning fingers.  But his road led on through a mountain pass.

The earth itself seemed to be climbing.  The mountain shapes, little and big, gathered in herds.  Cliffs, ravines, the hoarse song of water, the faces of few human folk, and on these written “Mountains, mountains!  Live as we can!  Catch who catch can!” After a time the road was deprived of even these faces.  The Scot thought of home mountains.  He thought of the Highlands.  Above him and at some distance to the right appeared a distribution of cliffs that reminded him of that hiding-place after Culloden.  He looked to see the birchwood, the wheeling eagle.  The sun was at noon.  Riding in a solitude, he almost dozed in the warm light.  The Highlands and the eagle wheeling above the crag....  Black Hill and Glenfernie and White Farm and Alexander....  Life generally, and all the funny little figures running full tilt, one against another....