“At eighteen I ‘took to the heather,’ as we say in the north, for a prolonged period....” Up the Gare-loch, close to Ardentinny, there was a point of waste land running into the water, frequently used as camping ground by roving tinkers and gipsies. Many a time he sailed there in his little boat to get in touch with these wandering folk. One summer he found there an encampment of true gipsies, who had come over from mid-Europe, a fine, swarthy, picturesque race. The appeal was irresistible, strengthened by the attraction of a beautiful gipsy girl. He made friends with the tribe, and persuaded the ‘king’ to let him join them; and so he became ‘star-brother’ and ‘sun-brother’ to them, and wandered with them over many hills and straths of the West Highlands. To him, who at all times hated the restrictions and limitations of conventional life, to whom romance was a necessity, this free life ‘on the heather’ was the realisation of many dreams. In those few months he learned diverse things; much wood-lore, bird-lore, how to know the ways of the wind, and to use the stars as compass. I do not know exactly how long he was with the camp; two months, perhaps, or three. For to him they were so full of wonder, so vivid, that in later life, when he spoke of them, he lost all count of time, and on looking back to those days, packed with new and keen experiences so wholly in keeping with his temperament, weeks seemed as months, and he ceased to realise that the experience was compressed into one short summer. He never wove these memories into a sequent romance, though in later time he thought of so doing. For one thing, the present was the absorbing actuality to him, and the future a dream to realise; whether in life or in work the past was past, and he preferred to project himself toward the future and what it might have in store for him. But traces of the influence of those gipsy days are to be seen in _Children of To-morrow_, in the character of Annaik in _Green Fire_, and in the greater part of the story of “The Gipsy Christ,” published later in the collection of short stories entitled _Madge o’ the Pool_. He also had projected a romance to be called _The Gipsy Trail_, but it was never even begun.