I wasn't used to living crowded cheek by jowl with numbers of other people, as was customary here. People ate, slept, and frequently copulated, crammed into tiny, stifling cottages, lit and warmed by smoky peat fires. The only thing they didn't do together was bathe - largely because they didn't bathe.

Highlanders make the truest friends-if only because they make the worst enemies.

Oh, womanly sympathy, love AND food?" I said, laughing. "Don't want a lot, do you?

The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was.

Really rather fascinating, you know,' he confided, and I recognized, with an internal sigh, the song of the scholar, as identifying a sound as the terr-whit! of a thrush.

Gentle he would be, denied he would not.

He gave you to me," she said, so low I could hardly hear her. "Now I have to give you back to him, Mama.