"I d'na kin," Sam'l would reply; "but there's nae doot the lassie was
fell fond o' me; ou, a mere passin' fancy, 's ye micht say."

"THE HEATHER LINTIE", By S. R. Crockett

Janet Balchrystie lived in a little cottage at the back of the Long
Wood of Barbrax. She had been a hard-working woman all her days, for her
mother died when she was but young, and she had lived on, keeping her
father's house by the side of the single-track railway-line. Gavin
Balchrystie was a foreman plate-layer on the P.P.R., and with two men
under him, had charge of a section of three miles. He lived just where
that distinguished but impecunious line plunges into a moss-covered
granite wilderness of moor and bog, where there is not more than a
shepherd's hut to the half-dozen miles, and where the passage of a
train is the occasion of commotion among scattered groups of black-faced
sheep. Gavin Balchrystie's three miles of P.P.R. metals gave him
little work, but a good deal of healthy exercise. The black-faced sheep
breaking down the fences and straying on the line side, and the torrents
coming down the granite gullies, foaming white after a water-spout, and
tearing into his embankments, undermining his chairs and plates, were
the only troubles of his life. There was, however, a little public-house
at The Huts, which in the old days of construction had had the license,
and which had lingered alone, license and all, when its immediate
purpose in life had been fulfilled, because there was nobody but the
whaups and the railway officials on the passing trains to object to
its continuance. Now it is cold and blowy on the west-land moors, and
neither whaups nor dark-blue uniforms object to a little refreshment up
there. The mischief was that Gavin Balchrystie did not, like the guards
and engine-drivers, go on with the passing train. He was always on the
spot, and the path through Barbrax Wood to the Railway Inn was as well
trodden as that which led over the bog moss, where the whaups built,
to the great white viaduct of Loch Merrick, where his three miles of
parallel gleaming responsibility began.

When his wife was but newly dead, and his Janet just a smart elf-locked
lassie running to and from the school, Gavin got too much in the way of
"slippin' doon by." When Janet grew to be woman muckle, Gavin kept the
habit, and Janet hardly knew that it was not the use and wont of all
fathers to sidle down to a contiguous Railway Arms, and return some