fiddle as he would, he found it impossible to gather them together again. Nevertheless, he followed one of the three groups, and in the heat of the chase, was led into a wild district amongst rocks and cascades, with overhanging trees, where the sheep seemed to turn quite wild, and subdividing into yet smaller bands, some were seen scaling the steep crags and looking down from dizzy heights, while others dashed into the water and swam across the mountain streams. Gilbert ran about almost like one possessed, vainly striving to collect the scattered fragments of the flock entrusted to his care, and in despair at the thought of the sorry figure he should cut on returning to give an account of his day's work to the lady, and sorely troubled at the prospect of losing the promised kiss which he would not have exchanged for a kingdom.

At length, after having scaled one of the highest crags, where he made sure of catching a sheep, which seemed just as he tried to seize it to merge into the spray of the waterfall that leaped down a kind of natural staircase of rocks, he felt so exhausted that he lay down on a knoll in the fissures of the rock, exclaiming: "Surely I must be bewitched!"

A loud laugh reverberated from the rocks below, and Gilbert slightly raised his head to see whence it proceeded. Seeing no one, he concluded it must be the cry of some strange bird, caught up by the echo, and then to drive away a kind of grisly feeling of terror that began to creep upon him, he took up his fiddle as he lay stretched on the grass, and fell to scraping away without the slightest regard to time or tune, more as if he were sawing a piece of wood, than playing on a musical instrument. He then became aware of a very curious thing, which was that the sheep all returned as he drew the bow backwards, tho' they were off again the moment he drew it forwards. This convinced him he had not attended to the manner in which the lady drew the bow, and accounted for his losing the sheep every evening. "Now," thought he, "I am sure of obtaining the kiss and the cup of wine, and I need take no further trouble about the flock."

Bye and bye what he had taken for the gnarled and knotted branches of a tree, at a short distance from the spot where he was lounging, gradually assumed a human shape, and he saw the old Scotch shepherd advancing towards him.

"So you have found it out at last!" said he with a merry twinkle in his eye, "and what are you going to do next?"

"Do?" echoed Gilbert, "why I shall roam about all day, and bring the sheep home every evening without a bit of trouble; and then the lady will be pleased with me, and who knows, as there seems to be no other young men hereabouts, but what she may make me the lord of her fine castle."

The Scotchman laughed loud and long, and it was not till Gilbert had nearly lost his temper that he could be induced to explain the cause of his mirth, and then he said: "Why, man, you have gone clean mad, and no wonder, as this fine lady of yours has been drugging you with Elfin wine to make a fool of you. If you don't mind she'll keep you here like a horse in a mill all the days of your life, running after clouds you mistake for sheep."

Gilbert winced at this, and did not half like to be told he was a day-dreamer. He maintained he saw the flocks all round him, while Sandy explained that morning mists were to be seen on the tops of all mountains, then become dispersed during the day, till they gather once more at the approach of night, and that mists also hover over waterfalls—and this was the whole history of Gilbert's flock. He had been served