und but a piece
of level arable land, bearing a rank swathe of grass and clover.[7]

Not a single individual did I find on the farm who had been there twenty
years before. I entered into conversation with one of the ploughmen,
apparently a man of some intelligence; but he had come to the place only
a summer or two previous, and the names of most of his predecessors
sounded unfamiliar in his ears: he knew scarce anything of the old laird
or his times, and but little of the general history of the district. The
frequent change of servants incident to the large-farm system has done
scarce less to wear out the oral antiquities of the country than has
been done by its busy ploughs in obliterating antiquities of a more
material cast. The mythologic legend and traditionary story have shared
the same fate, through the influence of the one cause, which has been
experienced by the sepulchral tumulus and the ancient encampment under
the operations of the other. I saw in the pillars and archways of the
farm-steading some of the hewn stones bearing my own mark,--an anchor,
to which I used to attach a certain symbolical meaning; and I pointed
them out to the ploughman. I had hewn these stones, I said, in the days
of the old laird, the grandfather of the present proprietor. The
ploughman wondered how a man still in middle life could have such a
story to tell. I must surely have begun work early in the day, he
remarked, which was perhaps the best way for getting it soon over. I
remembered having seen similar markings on the hewn-work of ancient
castles, and of indulging in, I daresay, idle enough speculations
regarding what was doing at court and in the field, in Scotland and
elsewhere, when the old long-departed mechanics had been engaged in
their work. When this mark was affixed, I have said, all Scotland was
in mourning for the disaster at Flodden, and the folk in the work-shed
would have been, mayhap, engaged in discussing the supposed treachery of
Home, and in arguing whether the hapless James had fallen in battle, or
gone on a pilgrimage to merit absolution for the death of his father.
And when this other more modern mark was affixed, the Gowrie conspiracy
must have been the topic of the day, and the mechanics were probably
speculating,--at worst not more doubtfully than the historians have done
after them,--on the guilt or innocence of the Ruthvens. It now rose
curiously enough in memory, that I was employed in fashioning one of t