The Project Gutenberg EBook of Huntingtower, by John Buchan

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Title: Huntingtower

Author: John Buchan

Posting Date: May 19, 2009 [EBook #3782]
Release Date: February, 2003
First Posted: June 12, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUNTINGTOWER ***

Produced by Edward A. White, Robert F. Jaffe, and Kirsten
Tozer. HTML version by Al Haines.

HUNTINGTOWER

BY

JOHN BUCHAN

To W. P. Ker.

If the Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford has not
forgotten the rock whence he was hewn, this simple story may give an
hour of entertainment. I offer it to you because I think you have met
my friend Dickson McCunn, and I dare to hope that you may even in your
many sojournings in the Westlands have encountered one or other of the
Gorbals Die-Hards. If you share my kindly feeling for Dickson, you will
be interested in some facts which I have lately ascertained about his
ancestry. In his veins there flows a portion of the redoubtable blood
of the Nicol Jarvies. When the Bailie, you remember, returned from his
journey to Rob Roy beyond the Highland Line, he espoused his
housekeeper Mattie, "an honest man's daughter and a near cousin o' the
Laird o' Limmerfield." The union was blessed with a son, who succeeded
to the Bailie's business and in due course begat daughters, one of whom
married a certain Ebenezer McCunn, of whom there is record in the
archives of the Hammermen of Glasgow. Ebenezer's grandson, Peter by
name, was Provost of Kirkintilloch, and his second son was the father
of my hero by his marriage with Robina Dickson, oldest daughter of one
Robert Dickson, a tenant-farmer in the Lennox. So there are coloured
threads in Mr. McCunn's pedigree, and, like the Bailie, he can count
kin, should he wish, with Rob Roy himself through "the auld wife ayont
the fire at Stuckavrallachan."

Such as it is, I dedicate to you the story, and ask for no better
verdict on it than that of that profound critic of life and literature,
Mr. Huckleberry Finn, who observed of the Pilgrim's Progress that he
"considered the statements interesting, but tough."

J.B.

CONT