at last only the good
smith with us. He was not a man of talk, and the tears had washed the
soot from his face in two white furrows.

"Ye'll hae a waught wi' me afore ye gang, John," he said clumsily, "for
th' morns we've paddl' 't thegither i' th' Nith."

The ale was brought by the guidwife, who paused, as she put it down, to
wipe her eyes with her apron. She gave John Paul one furtive glance and
betook herself again to her knitting with a sigh, speech having failed
her likewise. The captain grasped up his mug.

"May God bless you, Jamie," he said.

"Ye'll be gaen noo to see the mither," said Jamie, after a long space.

"Ay, for the last time. An', Jamie, ye'll see that nae harm cams to her
when I'm far awa'?"

The smith promised, and also agreed to have John Paul's chests sent by
wagon, that very day, to Dumfries. And we left him at his forge, his
honest breast torn with emotion, looking after us.

CHAPTER XXI

THE GARDENER'S COTTAGE

So we walked out of the village, with many a head craned after us and
many an eye peeping from behind a shutter, and on into the open highway.
The day was heavenly bright, the wind humming around us and playing mad
pranks with the white cotton clouds, and I forgot awhile the pity within
me to wonder at the orderly look of the country, the hedges with never a
stone out of place, and the bars always up. The ground was parcelled off
in such bits as to make me smile when I remembered our own wide tracts in
the New World. Here waste was sin: with us part and parcel of a creed.
I marvelled, too, at the primness and solidity of the houses along the
road, and remarked how their lines belonged rather to the landscape than
to themselves. But I was conscious ever of a strange wish to expand, for
I felt as tho' I were in the land of the Liliputians, and the thought of
a gallop of forty miles or so over these honeycombed fields brought me to
a laugh. But I was yet to see some estates of the gentry.

I had it on my tongue's tip to ask the captain whither he was taking me,
yet dared not intrude on the sorrow that still gripped him. Time and
time we met people plodding along, some of them nodding uncertainly,
others abruptly taking the far side of the pike, and every encounter
drove the poison deeper into his soul. But after we had travelled some
way, up hill and down dale, he vouchsafed the intelligence that we were
making for Arbigland, Mr. Craik's seat near Dumfries, which lies on th