ng over his horses or sitting on the barn-bridge of
an evening sorrowing for Annie Laurie and Nellie Grey, women whom he
had never seen. Before all the town he raised his hand and brought it
crashing down on Mr. Pound's cloud-like hat.

CHAPTER III

My mother was a McLaurin of Tuckapo Valley. In the mid-part of the
eighteenth century, when that valley was a wild forest, her
great-grandfather, Angus McLaurin, came out of the air, out of the
nothingness of a hiatus in our genealogy, and settled along the banks
of the Juniata. His worldly goods were strapped on the back of a cow;
his sole companion was his wife; his sole defence his rifle. To the
dusky citizens of the valley he seemed a harmless person, and they sold
him some thousands of acres for a few pounds of powder and beads. They
must have smiled when he attacked the wilderness with an axe, as we
should smile at the old woman who tried to ladle up the sea. With what
chagrin must they look down now from the Happy Hunting Ground to see
McLaurinville the busy metropolis of McLaurin township, and McLaurins
rich and poor, McLaurins in brick mansions and McLaurins in log cabins
where they once chased the deer and bear! My mother was one of _the_
McLaurins, which is to say that she was born on the very spot where
Angus felled the first tree in Tuckapo. These McLaurins were naturally
the proudest of all their wide-spread family, some of whom had gone
down to the poor-house, and some up and over the mountains to be lost
and snubbed among the great ones of other valleys. There was a
tradition in our family, which grew stronger as the years covered the
roots of our family tree, that Angus was really _The_ McLaurin, chief
of the clan, and had fled over the sea to save his head after Prince
Charlie's futile struggle for a crown. With my mother tradition had
become history. She had one grudge against Walter Scott, whose novels,
with the Bible, made her sole reading, and this was that he never
mentioned "our chief," as she called him. More than once I can
remember her looking up from the pages of "Redgauntlet," and declaring
that had the Prince been a more capable man we should be living in a
castle in Scotland. From the incompetence of Prince Charlie, then, it
came that my mother entered life in a red brick house in McLaurinville
instead of in a highland keep, and as it is just six miles as the crow
flies over the ridges to Malcolmville in Windy Valley, she me