On ran the laughing child, the mother after him; but as well might a giant pursue a fairy.
Flora followed the path they had taken, and was beginning to enjoy the keen bracing air of the hills, when she happened to cast her eyes to the far-off meadows beneath. Her head grew suddenly giddy, and she could not divest herself of the idea, that one false step would send her to the plains below. Here was a most ridiculous and unromantic position: she neither dared to advance nor retreat; and she stood grasping a ledge of the rocky wall in an agony of cowardice and irresolution. At this critical moment, the mother of the run-away child returned panting from the higher ledge of the mountain, and, perceiving Flora pale and trembling, very kindly stopped and asked what ailed her.
Flora could not help laughing while she confessed her fears, lest she should fall from the narrow footpath on which she stood. The woman, though evidently highly amused at her distress, had too much native kindliness of heart, which is the mother of genuine politeness, to yield to the merriment which hovered about her lips.
“Ye are na accustomed to the hills,” she said, in her northern dialect, “or ye wa’d na dread a hillock like this. Ye suld ha’ been born whar I wa’ born, to ken a mountain fra’ a mole-hill. There is my bairn, noo, I canna’ keep him fra’ the mountain. He will gang awa’ to the tap, an’ only laughs at me when I spier to him to come doon. It’s a’ because he is sae weel begotten—an’ all his forbears war reared amang the hills.”
The good woman sat down upon a piece of the loose rock, and commenced a long history of herself, of her husband, and of the great clan of Macdonald (to which they belonged), which at last ended in the discovery, that her aristocratic spouse was a Corporal in the Highland regiment then stationed in Edinburgh, and that Flora, his wife, washed for the officers in the said regiment—that the little Donald, with his wild-goat propensities, was their only child, and so attached to the hills, that she could not keep him confined to the meadows below! The moment her eye was off him, his great delight was to lead her a dance up the mountain, which, as she never succeeded in catching him, was quite labour in vain.