auseway so called, being the remains of an old Roman road which
traverses these wild regions in a due northerly direction. Here they got
on at the rate of nine or ten miles an hour, Dumple seeking no other
respite than what arose from changing his pace from canter to trot. 'I
could gar him show mair action,' said his master, 'but we are twa
lang-legged chields after a', and it would be a pity to stress Dumple;
there wasna the like o' him at Staneshiebank Fair the day.'

Brown readily assented to the propriety of sparing the horse, and added
that, as they were now far out of the reach of the rogues, he thought Mr.
Dintnont had better tie a handkerchief round his head, for fear of the
cold frosty air aggravating the wound.

'What would I do that for?' answered the hardy farmer; 'the best way's to
let the blood barken upon the cut; that saves plasters, hinney.'

Brown, who in his military profession had seen a great many hard blows
pass, could not help remarking, 'he had never known such severe strokes
received with so much apparent indifference.'

'Hout tout, man! I would never be making a humdudgeon about a scart on
the pow; but we'll be in Scotland in five minutes now, and ye maun gang
up to Charlie's Hope wi' me, that's a clear case.'

Brown readily accepted the offered hospitality. Night was now falling
when they came in sight of a pretty river winding its way through a
pastoral country. The hills were greener and more abrupt than those which
Brown had lately passed, sinking their grassy sides at once upon the
river. They had no pretensions to magnificence of height, or to romantic
shapes, nor did their smooth swelling slopes exhibit either rocks or
woods. Yet the view was wild, solitary, and pleasingly rural. No
inclosures, no roads, almost no tillage; it seemed a land which a
patriarch would have chosen to feed his flocks and herds. The remains of
here and there a dismantled and ruined tower showed that it had once
harboured beings of a very different description from its present
inhabitants; those freebooters, namely, to whose exploits the wars
between England and Scotland bear witness.

Descending by a path towards a well-known ford, Dumple crossed the small
river, and then, quickening his pace, trotted about a mile briskly up its
banks, and approached two or three low thatched houses, placed with their
angles to each other, with a great contempt of regularity. This was the
farm-steading of Charlie's Hope, or