the
drove-roads, that now lie green and solitary through the heather, were
thronged thoroughfares. He had himself often marched flocks into England,
sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; and by his account it was a
rough business, not without danger. The drove-roads lay apart from
habitation; the drovers met in the wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea
fishers meet off the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the
one as in the other case rough habits and fist-law were the rule. Crimes
were committed, sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of
which offences had a moorland burial, and were never heard of in the
courts of justice. John, in those days, was at least once attacked,--by
two men after his watch,--and at least once, betrayed by his habitual
anger, fell under the danger of the law and was clapped into some rustic
prison-house, the doors of which he burst in the night and was no more
heard of in that quarter. When I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter
places, and he had no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and the
inroads of pedestrians from town. But for a man of his propensity to
wrath these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by
snatches; in the grey of the summer morning, and already from far up the
hill, he would wake the "toun" with the sound of his shoutings; and in
the lambing-time, his cries were not yet silenced late at night. This
wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said to haunt that quarter of the
Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no doubt it added to the fear in which
men stood of John a touch of something legendary. For my own part he was
at first my enemy, and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural
abhorrence. It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing him only
by some sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me "c'way oot
amang the sheep." The quietest recesses of the hill harboured this ogre;
I skulked in my favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the Killing
Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my questing
dragoons. Little by little we dropped into civilities: his hail at sight
of me began to have less of the ring of a war-slogan; soon, we never met
but he produced his snuff-box, which was with him, like the calumet with
the Red Indian, a part of the heraldry of peace; and at length, in the
ripeness of time, we grew to be a pair of friends, and when I lived alone
in these parts in the winter, it was a