Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought
neither help nor contentment. Meantime our family
was dying out in the lowlands ; there is little luck for
any of that race ; and perhaps my father was the luck-
iest of all, for not only was he one of the last to die, but
he left a son to his name and a little money to support
it. I was a student of Edinburgh University, living well
enough at my own charges, but without kith or kin; when
some news of me found its way to Uncle Q-ordon on the
Boss of Grisapol ; and he, as he was a man who held
blood thicker than water, wrote to me the day he heard
of my existence, and taught me to count Aros as my
home. Thus it was that I came to spend my vacations
in that part of the country, so far from all society and
comfort, between the codfish and the moorcocks; and
thus it was that now, when I had done with my classes,
I was returning thither with so light a heart that July
day.
The Boss, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide
nor high, but as rough as God made it to this day ; the
deep sea on either hand of it, full of rugged isles and
reefs most perilous to seamen — all overlooked from the
eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peak of
Ben Kyaw. The Mountain of the Mist, they say the
words signify in the Gaelic tongue ; and it is well named.
