had the luck to have neither wife nor child to think
about, and Harry Redgauntlet had both one and t'other.--You have seen
Harry, Mrs. Crosbie?'

'In troth have I,' said she, with the sigh which we give to early
recollections, of which the object is no more. 'He was not so tall as
his brother, and a gentler lad every way. After he married the great
English fortune, folk called him less of a Scottishman than Edward.'

'Folk lee'd, then,' said Summertrees; 'poor Harry was none of your
bold-speaking, ranting reivers, that talk about what they did yesterday,
or what they will do to-morrow; it was when something was to do at the
moment that you should have looked at Harry Redgauntlet. I saw him at
Culloden, when all was lost, doing more than twenty of these bleezing
braggarts, till the very soldiers that took him cried not to hurt
him--for all somebody's orders, provost--for he was the bravest fellow
of them all. Weel, as I went by the side of Harry, and felt him raise my
hand up in the mist of the morning, as if he wished to wipe his eye--for
he had not that freedom without my leave--my very heart was like to
break for him, poor fellow. In the meanwhile, I had been trying and
trying to make my hand as fine as a lady's, to see if I could slip it
out of my iron wristband. You may think,' he said, laying his broad bony
hand on the table, 'I had work enough with such a shoulder-of-mutton
fist; but if you observe, the shackle-bones are of the largest, and so
they were obliged to keep the handcuff wide; at length I got my hand
slipped out, and slipped in again; and poor Harry was sae deep in his
ain thoughts, I could not make him sensible what I was doing.'

'Why not?' said Alan Fairford, for whom the tale began to have some
interest.

'Because there was an unchancy beast of a dragoon riding close beside
us on the other side; and if I had let him into my confidence as well as
Harry, it would not have been long before a pistol-ball slapped through
my bonnet.--Well, I had little for it but to do the best I could for
myself; and, by my conscience, it was time, when the gallows was staring
me in the face. We were to halt for breakfast at Moffat. Well did I know
the moors we were marching over, having hunted and hawked on every acre
of ground in very different times. So I waited, you see, till I was on
the edge of Errickstane-brae--Ye ken the place they call the Marquis's
Beef-stand, because the Annandale loons used to put their s