The few days of cold sunshine quickly passed, and the weather reverted to the norm. For a while the landscape was obscured again by dense Scotch mist driving horizontally across at gale force speed, but on Wednesday the skies cleared at times, and between the sudden showers of rain mixed with battering, icy hail, there were some pleasantly bright intervals.

Algy perched on the banks of the Blue Burn, and watched the water swirling quickly past him on its way to the sea. After a winter of almost perpetual rain and other precipitation, he was amazed that it was not more flooded. The land was exceedingly soggy, and pools formed spontaneously every time that it rained again, but the water drained rapidly away through the peat bogs, into the burns and away to the ocean. Algy guessed that this landscape had thoroughly adapted to excessive water over the course of many, many years of constant rainfall!

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