CHAPTER IV.
AN AFTERNOON SLEEP.
Presently, without having thought whither he meant to go, he found himself out of sight of the house--in a favourite haunt, but one in which he always had a peculiar feeling of strangeness and even expatriation.

He had descended the stream that rushed past the end of the house, till it joined the valley river, and followed the latter up, to where it took a sudden sharp turn, and a little farther.

Then he crossed it, and was in a lonely nook of the glen, with steep braes about him on all sides, some of them covered with grass, others rugged and unproductive.

He threw himself down in the clover, a short distance from the stream, and straightway felt as if he were miles from home.

No shadow of life was to be seen.
Cottage-chimney nor any smoke was visible--no human being, no work of human hands, no sign of cultivation except the grass and clover.
Now whether it was that in childhood he had learned that here he was beyond his father's land, or that some early sense of loneliness in the place had been developed by a brooding fancy into a fixed feeling, I cannot well say; but certainly, as often as he came--and he liked to visit the spot, and would sometimes spend hours in it--he felt like a hermit of the wilderness cut off from human society, and was haunted with a vague sense of neighbouring hostility.