e house of Balmaghie.

The days, however, were fine and dry, and a fanning wind from the north
blew in our faces as we went. It was near to the road-end of the
Duchrae, up which I had so often helped the cars (or sledges of wood
with birch twigs for wheels) to drag the hay crop, that we met Roderick
MacPherson, a Highland man-servant of the Laird of Balmaghie, riding one
pony and leading other two. We knew them at once as those which for
common were ridden by Kate McGhie and Maisie Lennox.

"Hey, where away, Roderick?" cried Wat, as soon as he set eyes on the
cavalcade.

The fellow looked through his lowering thatch of eyebrows and grunted,
but whether with stupidity or cunning it had been hard to say.

"Speak!" said Wat, threateningly; "you can understand well enough, when
they cry from the kitchen door that it is porridge time."

"The leddies was tak' a ride," MacPherson answered, with a cock in his
eye that angered Wat, whose temper, indeed, in these days was not of the
most enduring.

"Where did you leave them?" cried he of Lochinvar.

"It was on a muir, no far frae a burnside; I was fair forget where!"
said Roderick, with a look of the most dense stupidity.

Then I saw the fellow had been commanded not to tell, so I said to Wat,

"Come on, Wat. Kate has ordered him not to tell us."

"This is a bonny like thing," said Wat, angrily, "that I canna truss him
up and make him tell, only because I am riding with the hill-folk. Oh,
that I were a King's man of any sort for half an hour."

For, indeed, it is the glory of the field-folk, who have been blamed for
many extremes and wild opinions, that though tortured and tormented
themselves by the King's party, they used not torture upon their
enemies--as in later times even the Whigs did, when after the
Eighty-eight it came to be their time to govern.

So we permitted the Highland tyke to go on his way. There is no need to
go into the place and manner of our journeyings, in such a pleasant and
well-kenned country as the strath of the Kells. But, suffice it to say,
after a time we betook ourselves to the broad of the moors, and so held
directly for the fastnesses of the central hills, where the poor hunted
folk kept sanctuary.

We kept wide of the rough and tumbled country about the lochs of
Neldricken and Enoch; because, to our cost and detriment, we knew that
place was already much frequented by the ill-contriving gipsy people
thereabouts--rascals who thought