[Gutenberg 58253] • The Minister's Wife

CHAPTER I. The Glebe Cottage at the head of Loch Diarmid was something between a primitive cottage and the little house of gentility, commonly called by that name. The hill- side of which it was the sole inhabitant had once been ecclesiastical soil belonging to the chm-ch of Lochhead, which was about a mile distant across the braes — and still, so far as this one dwelling was concerned, retained the name. It had originally been a building of one story thatched and mossy ; but lately a few additional rooms had been built over one part of it, and covered with respectable slates. It was composite and characteristic, a human thing, growing out of human rules, and consequently- more picturesque than if it had been the result of the most picturesque intention. The thatched end of the cottage was surrounded by no enclosure ; the soft rich mossy grass of the hills broken by great bushes of heather pressed up to its very walls ; while the other half, or western end, was cultivated VOL. I. B and formed into a pretty homely garden. Hardy roses and honeysuckles, and a waving wealth of fuchsias, hanging rich with crimson bells, clothed the southern front and west end, — the refined part of the cottage. On the mountain side, there was nothing but the rough, low whitewashed wall, the overhanging thatch, the heather within a yard of the house. The same characteristic difference existed even in respect to the landscape. The east windows looked out upon a noble range of hills, between the folds of which a gleam of distant water, branching off into two lochs, was visible over a purple glow of heather. The west had a softer prospect. Low at the foot of the hill lay a third loch, one of the smallest and least renowned, but one of the loveliest in the Highlands, green with foliage, and specked by scattered white houses on either shore among the trees. The wooded banks would have looked too soft for Scotland, but for the summit of heather which rose, sometimes brown, sometimes purple, against the often cloudy, often rainy sky. Looked at from the height on a day in June, with a blue sky blazing over head, the golden whins lighting the hillside, the heather greening over and preparing its bells ; the grass like smooth-shorn velvet, half grass, half moss ; the little birches waving their long locks in the soft breeze — Loch Diarmid lying glorified in the sunshine on one side, and ' dark Loch Goil ' gleaming round that gloomy giant's shoulders on the other — I do not think the whole world holds a lovelier scene. It was upon this mount of vision that the Glebe Cottage had planted itself, very inconveniently apart from other people, yet in a position which a queen might have envied. And here, some thirty years ago, Jived a family of Diarmids, as curiously varied in internal constitution as was the aspect of their home.