"Yes," said he, rather gloomily. "I suppose it is superstition, or you
may have it in your blood; but the horror I have of the eyes of a
snake--I cannot tell you of it. Perhaps I was frightened when I was a
child--I cannot remember; or perhaps it was the stories of the old
women. The serpent is very mysterious to the people in the Highlands:
they have stories of watersnakes in the lochs: and if you get a nest of
seven adders with one white one, you boil the white one, and the man who
drinks the broth knows all things in heaven and earth. In the Lewis they
call the serpent _righinn_, that is, '_a princess;_' and they say that
the serpent is a princess bewitched. But that is from fear--it is a
compliment--"

"But surely there are no serpents to be afraid of in the Highlands?"
said Miss White. She was looking rather curiously at him.

"No," said he, in the same gloomy way. "The adders run away from you if
you are walking through the heather. If you tread on one, and he bites
your boot, what then? He cannot hurt you. But suppose you are out after
the deer, and you are crawling along the heather with your face to the
ground, and all at once you see the two small eyes of an adder looking
at you and close to you--"

He shuddered slightly--perhaps it was only an expression of disgust.

"I have heard," he continued, "that in parts of Islay they used to be so
bad that the farmers would set fire to the heather in a circle, and as
the heather burned in and in you could see the snakes and adders
twisting and curling in a great ball. We have not many with us. But one
day John Begg, that is the schoolmaster, went behind a rock to get a
light for his pipe; and he put his head close to the rock to be out of