The letter was encouraging, and Wilson went forth to spy the land and
initiate the plan of campaign. It was an important day for him. He
entered on his feud with Gourlay, and bought Rab Jamieson's house and
barn (with the field behind it) for a trifle. He had five hundred of his
own, and he knew where more could be had for the asking.

Rab Jamieson's barn was a curious building to be stranded in the midst
of Barbie. In quaint villages and little towns of England you sometimes
see a mellow red-tiled barn, with its rich yard, close upon the street;
it seems to have been hemmed in by the houses round, while dozing, so
that it could not escape with the fields fleeing from the town. There it
remains and gives a ripeness to the place, matching fitly with the great
horse-chestnut yellowing before the door, and the old inn further down,
mantled in its blood-red creepers. But that autumnal warmth and cosiness
is rarely seen in the barer streets of the north. How Rab Jamieson's
barn came to be stuck in Barbie nobody could tell. It was a gaunt, gray
building with never a window, but a bole high in one corner for the
sheaves, and a door low in another corner for auld Rab Jamieson. There
was no mill inside, and the place had not been used for years. But the
roof was good, and the walls stout and thick, and Wilson soon got to
work on his new possession. He had seen all that could be made of the
place the moment he clapped an eye on it, and he knew that he had found
a good thing, even if the pits should never come near Barbie. The bole
and door next the street were walled up, and a fine new door opened in
the middle, flanked on either side by a great window. The interior was
fitted up with a couple of counters and a wooden floor; and above the
new wood ceiling there was a long loft for a storeroom, lighted by
skylights in the roof. That loft above the rafters, thought the
provident Wilson, will come in braw and handy for storing things, so it
will. And there, hey presto! the transformation was achieved, and
Wilson's Emporium stood before you. It was crammed with merchandise. On
the white flapping slant of a couple of awnings, one over each window,
you might read in black letters, "JAMES WILSON: EMPORIUM." The letters
of "James Wilson" made a triumphal arch, to which "Emporium" was the
base. It seemed symbolical.

Now, the shops of Barbie (the drunken man's shop and the dirty man's
shop always excepted, of course) had usually been