lms your house
has given me and mine!"

She was gone before he could reply, and when Brown opened the purse, he
was astonished to find in it gold to the amount of nearly one hundred
pounds, besides many valuable jewels. The gipsy had endowed him with a
fortune.

INTERLUDE OF LOCALITY

"And all this happened here?" repeated Sweetheart,
incredulously, pointing up at the dark purple
mountains of Screel and Ben Gairn.

"Well," I answered, "Scott's Solway is the Dumfries
Solway, not the Galloway Solway. Portanferry exists
not far from Glencaple on the eastern bank of Nith,
and the castle of Ellangowan is as like as possible
to Caerlaverock."

"But he _says_ Galloway!" objected Sweetheart, who
has a pretty persistence of her own. "And I wanted
Ellangowan to be in Galloway. What with Carlyle
having been born there, the Dumfries folk have
quite enough to be proud of!"

"Yes, Scott _says_ Ellangowan is in Galloway," said
I, "but nevertheless to any one who knows the
country, it remains obstinately in Dumfries-shire.
His swamps and morasses are those of Lochar. The
frith is the Dumfries-shire Solway, the castle a
Dumfries-shire castle, and what Scott put in of
Galloway tradition was sent him by his friend the
Castle Douglas exciseman."

"Oh!" said Sweetheart, a little ruefully, "but are
you sure?"

"Certain," I answered, "if you consider time and
distance from the border--say from Charlies-hope,
you will see that Brown could not possibly have
reached the heart of Galloway. Besides, Scott was
far too wise a man to write about what he did not
know. So he wove in Train's Galloway legends, but
he put the people into his own well-kenned dresses,
and set them to act their parts under familiar
skies. Hence it is, that though the taste of Scott
was never stronger than in _Guy Mannering_, the
flavour of Galloway is somehow not in the mouth!"

"What does it matter where it all happened?" cried
Hugh John; "it is a rattling good tale, anyway, and
if the Man-who-Wrote-It imagined that it all
happened in Galloway, surely _we_ can!"

This being both sensible and unanswerable, the
party scattered to improvise old castles of
Ellangowan, and to squabble for what was to them
the only wholly desirable part, that of Dirk
Hatteraick. The combat between the sm