Mrs Chester Royde tossed her red locks. The echoes of ancestral voices prophesying war were ringing in her ears when she took from the butler the packet of sandwiches and set out to commune with her forefathers, the nettle-grown tumbled stones of whose cottages were strewn about the emptiness of wild Glenbogle. In one pocket of her green coat were the sandwiches, in the other a copy of Gaelic Without Tears.

Seldom can the long winding drive of Glenbogle Castle have been graced by a more becoming figure than that presented by Mrs Chester Royde Jr. when she set out that morning to commune with her ancestors. She was wearing a skirt of the tartan of the Ben Nevis MacDonalds, the predominance of red in which did not detract from her own red hair, thanks to the judicious interposition of the green coat, and her green bonnet was brooched with the eagle’s head of the Ben Nevis MacDonalds. Her host had presented her with a cromag as dainty as the crook of a Dresden shepherdess. The dark pines that bordered the drive seemed to light up when she passed as if touched by a fleeting sunbeam.

She paused a moment at the gate and looked up at the two water-horses mordant gnashing their teeth at one another from the lichen-covered pillars on either side. She turned to the vocabulary of her Gaelic Without Tears to see if she could find the Gaelic for water-horse, but it was evidently too difficult a word for such an elementary instructor and was not to be found. Just beyond the gate a Glenbogle estate painter was admiring the result of some recent work on a large notice-board:

GLENBOGLE CASTLE. NO CAMPING.

Thus the inscription ran in large black letters on a white ground. The spread of hiking had soured the milk of human kindness. No longer was permission readily granted on application at the lodge by the main entrance-gate to wander in the well-wooded policies of the Castle, as recorded by the author of Summer Days Among the Heather.

Carrie debated with herself for a moment whether she should venture to give the painter ‘good day’ in Gaelic, decided that one had to begin some time, looked up the phrase in her little brown volume, muttered her phonetics over to herself once or twice, and gulped:

“La math.”

There are few joys accessible to human beings more grateful than the joy of trying out a phrase from a conversation manual according to the pronunciation indicated in brackets alongside and finding that the subject of the experiment understands and responds. This joy was denied to Mrs Chester Royde. It was clear from the expression on the painter’s face as he touched his cap that he was respectfully hoping the Castle guest would amplify her question if it was a question or if she had not really addressed him at all relieve his embarrassment by doing so.