ruin at the foot of the Gallow Hill (where I found the little fairy farm and flower-garden) wear a dreary aspect, more desolate even than those frequent ruins of desolated homes just two gaunt roofless gables-that are seen afar in distant fields from the windows of some passing train. There remains only a heap of big foundationstones smothered in weeds and thistles.

Nothing certain is known about the Gallow Hill, or the meaning of its gruesome name. Straight up the steep brae leads the path to the spot where it is said the gallows stood. All who came and went through that cottage door must have seen it. From the peephole window by the hearth it would be for ever in sight. One can fancy how, as years went on, the little home would become distasteful to the dwellers in it, and it was at last deserted and pulled down. The hillside grass is fine and short, and thick with flowers. The track climbs through a plantation of young spruce and between the hoary boles of a few ancient beeches, and then, the summit reached, one may rest upon the heather, all interwoven with blaeberry and thyme, and dream away a sunny August hour. All around, above, below, reigns profoundest silence. No living creatures can be seen save the feeding cattle and white sea-gulls, down in the low-lying pasture-lands. A wide landscape fraught with the stillness of deep peace spreads away and away to the far horizonline of lilac hills. The sun shines sweetly on near farms and woods. On such a day, it might well have been, took place the last tragedy connected with the gibbet when it stood there, reared up on the hill-crest where we now take our ease, resting among

the honey-scented heath - bells. From the highroad a mile away, and from every path and every house within sight, the awful Thing could be seen, silhouetted black against the sun-bright sky. The half-forgotten tales that with difficulty may be extracted still from the country-folk round about are of the vaguest. Whatever happened here must have been at least 150 years ago. The parish archives-a part of which perished by fire-are silent upon the subject. Some say this was the place of execution for the whole of New Machar; others, that here stood the gallows-tree of the lairds of Elrick, in the ugly old times when the lairds, or barons, "had power of pit and gallows." No deep loch -like the loch of Spynie-being near at hand, the maintenance of a gallows was of course a necessary expense! "The oldest inhabitant tells a tradition of his boyhood. Two herd-boys posted on the hill to watch the cattle (the land was not in those days enclosed) were playing together, and one hung up the other in sport upon a tree. Returning in an hour, the lad was dead as he hung. Then the boy suffered death himself, on the gibbet set up for him alone. another and more ghastly tradition lingers, and would seem to point to the first idea, of a place of public execution. They say that one hot summer a hundred years ago the ripened berries had to be left to hang ungathered on the bushes in cottage-gardens within a certain distance of the Gallow Hill. Whatever may be the truth of all that is said to have happened here in those far days, time has since so wrought as to mellow into wild loveliness the once drear aspect of the hill of doom. We only know it now as a flowery brae from whose summit is seen the prettiest

Yet

home-view in all the countryside. Children love to play there; and thither will many a lover and his lass stroll out on Sunday afternoons. They never trouble about the old grim past! whilst I, who forget it never, often turn my steps that way in fond iteration. A part of the attraction simply means, it must be owned, that after a long walk southward, to return round by the Gallow Brae is usually the nearest way home.

Across the moss-rich in June and July with golden sedge and bog- buttercup, or white with downy tufts of pussies (cottongrass) the uncertain track is lost -at times a little unaccountably in a great voiceless pine wood. It may be found again on the margin of a little lonely loch, whence it leads back through the pines, out into the cheerful roads. The Great Wood (so named by none except myself!) is not really very large, only its extent is greater than some other neighbouring woods. The charm of it is ideal. Even in autumn it is all suffused with the fragrance of the firs. The tall trees stand apart, and give breathing-room for every kind of wood wild-flower to push up and thrive, through the brown carpet of fallen fir-needles. Patches of purple heather, with intervals of rosy ling, mix with the bright emerald of wood-sorrel. Hosts of small scabious toss light balls of lilac wool in all the more open greener spaces, above a network of creeping tormentilla. Ferns there are in profusest, daintiest variety, half-hiding scarcer crowberry with dark polished foliage. Thinly scattered through all the outer fringes of the wood-luxuriantly crowding the deeper, cooler shades-the eye is conscious of pale-brown triplet leaves on delicate inch-long stalks.

It is wintergreen (Trientalis europaea), pride of the northern woods. Why our English name is wintergreen were hard to tell. When in June their prime was done, the little white flowers loosed hold and fell away-not petal by petal, but whole, like scattered snow stars. Then, along with fresh green summer, the substance of leaves and stalks decayed, until all the plant seemed dipped in a brown autumnal dye. By-andby each sombre coloured triple leaf upheld a pearly seed or two. Often in warm September days has this white seed deceived unwary strangers, who, forgetting how the flowery time is long past, think to find fresh blooms upon the wintergreen. Soon these brown reliquiæ with their pearls shall perish and burn away into oblivion-small mimic flames of crimson.

Signs of some small arboreous life are not wanting in the wood. The ground is littered with short ends and tassels of firtwigs nipt off from upper branches. Squirrels mostly are accused of the mischief (mischief far more likely to be the work of the insidious pine - beetle). A surer token of the unseen active presence somewhere of these little sportive beings is, that every red "tode-stol" has been skinned on the very first day of its appearing. In the brisk clear atmosphere of the fir-wood no such unwelcome guest as a corpse candle," so called, will ever peer in among the throngs of fine tawny agarics springing up from under tawny fir-needles. These, with shy violet ones that enliven sometimes the moist dead leaves lying underneath isolated beech, seem to escape attention from the squirrels. They are never peeled as are the scarlet and orange. Do the little rascal

"shadow - tails" taste a sugary flavour in the fine colour? They hide away so cleverly that rarely does the whisk of a tail of one betray it. Later in autumn they become more fearless, and are bold enough to chatter and scold, at hide-and-seek among the branches. Then is the time to scatter nuts and almonds for them on the lawn close under our windows, and look for repayment in watching the delicious grace of their gambolling. The shadow-tails will dance about the lawn light as withered leaves,-with frugal forethought, in contrast to their usual frivolity, sowing the turf with every nut they do not crack and eat. Could one but be a St Francis and attain the gift of charming wild creatures of the woods! There are those at whose call a squirrel will climb down from some high branch and take a nut from the hand, or perch inconveniently on the book in their lap if they happen to be reading under a tree. There is a lady I know, one who draws to her all living creatures. She was visited last week by a fine hedgehog, on the morning of her eighty-fifth birthday. When she opened the garden door, there sat Prickles waiting on the doormat. He was regaled with milk, and next morning came again for more, bringing a pair of young ones with him. Such examples, however, of the power we covet are rare. Whilst at play with the shadowtails, dare it be whispered how the only bit of a sermon I ever remembered much of afterwards, occurred in one (preached by the Bishop of Oxford) at the service of completion of a village churchtower in Bucks. Referring to the old towers as land-marks, the sermon went on to describe that particular district of Mercia as it was in the olden days. "For forty miles

in a straight line," the Bishop said, "a squirrel might leap from tree to tree." A suggestive enough sketch this, of the country Milton knew and loved, with its small old villages set in the midst of forest-land.

Other, lesser forms of life abound in late summer days in this woody wild. There is a curious semblance of a transmigration into winged life, in the hosts of new-born, yellowish, filmy moths fluttering just above the yellow withered grasses ! They have just escaped from silky cells where in their chrysalis state they lie; and until they rise and fly, one would scarce guess the existence of these living leaves, these faded moths, so exactly are moth and dry grass matched in colour, to a shade. Should the spinning of cocoons not yet have begun, and the hour for retirement from the world not come, the eye may chance upon some lovely caterpillar fattening on the heather. Nature truly gives rein to fancy of a marvellous order in her decorations of some of these amongst the lowliest of her creatures. Nature's consummate taste and infinite variety are here displayed in endless combinations of both form and tint. A favourite type-one sees it everywhere—is done with ornamental side-stripes of electric blue and black velvet cross-bands, set off with a head decoration of black peacock's crests and tufts of spun silver all along the back. Not one in ten thousand of these art masterpieces in miniature is like to be seen of men. But to the serene grandeur of the mind of Nature, what matter? The heather in the shaded woods is not broad or deep enough to sustain with safety a caterpillar so grand as one we once met on a grousemoor over the hill, within sound of the sea. The girth of it was huge, and in length it measured

nigh four inches. The green of it matched the heather leaf on which it fed, and it bore on each segment tiny raised rosettes in pink, set on rings of black velvet, closely imitating the pink heath - buds. The copy was so true that living creature and flowering spray were one in appearance. This black velvet, so much used for insect patterns of all varieties, may possibly be meant to represent an effect of shadow or of empty space, behind or under the mimicry in the pattern, whatever it may be. Another beauty, a good sized hairy caterpillar, who has a habit of crossing the path, is clothed in sleek chestnut fur, with the customary trimmings of black velvet. He is a fine fellow in his way, feeding on and on till the end of autumn; so the warm fur coat must be comfortable. There are no bright pigments in reserve for the painting of the imago's wings, at least of these species. When the perfect moth comes forth it is dark night. In the dark they take their pleasure, and dark colours suit well the brown heathlands where they play.

On dry autumnal afternoons, though sundown be near at hand, there seems no need to hurry homeward. It is so sweet to sit down a while, cushioned among blaeberry and ferns, and let Time's steps steal past uncounted! The stillness is profound-like the still silence in a dream; for now the "squirrel's granary is full, and no birds sing." Between the red pine-stems a level ray strikes along the glistening pathway netted over with gossamer, weaving a silvery weft which stretches endlessly afar, till lost at last in the golden sun-mist. The way home takes us by the edges of the little loch. Since this time last year how spoilt it is! The great December gale flung down

its tallest pines along the right bank. Down into the water they fell, and there ever after they are likely to lie neglected and decaying-for it is worth no one's while to remove them. All the repose of the tiny lakelet with its clear reflections has vanished. The pretty water-looking-glass is shattered, without a hope of mending. Earlier in the summer we might have forgotten all this ruin, in the pleasure of watching the dragonflies on the reedy margin. Strong, swift, hungry hunters! arrayed in lucid tinsel, coursing up and down in the glory of the latest sunglance. Myriads of ephemera there are, in the plenitude of their monotonous enjoyment. There is a kind of pathos about them as they rise and fall by the million in rhythmic dance above the water, to the tune of "a short life and a merry one"! Two hours is the longest allotted to any one of them

cut short to a few minutes by many a greedy trout. This is how an observant parish minister describes ephemere, in a county history of the last century (it may be concluded they are the creatures alluded to): "About sunset the loch is infested by flies of the gnat kind, which fasten in great numbers on every part of the fisher's clothes, and, leaving their skins, fly off sportive as from a prison. The incumbent has often returned home covered with their spolia opima." Flies of the gnat kind, and others, are but a by-interest. It is the spoilt loch that for the moment fills the thoughts with unavailing regrets. Happily the wood itself was not laid waste by that outrageous gale in 1894. Folk talked of the "blind fury" of it. It might be more graphically true to affirm that the storm fiend that luckless

day deliberately picked out for ruin the loftiest old trees, the fin