go and see him at all. But you must
learn to behave like the gentleman you are, and that you never will
while you frequent the company of your inferiors. Your manners are
already almost ruined--fit for no place but a farmhouse! There you are,
standing on the side of your foot again!--Old Barclay, I dare say, tells
you no end of stories about your mother!'
'He always asks after you, mother, and then never mentions you more.'
She knew perfectly that the boy spoke the truth.
'Don't let me hear of your being there again before you go to school!'
she said definitively. 'By the time you come home next year I trust your
tastes will have improved. Go and make yourself tidy for dinner. A
soldier's son must before everything attend to his dress.'
Francis went to his room, feeling it absolutely impossible to have told
his mother that he had been with Kirsty Barclay, that he had run a race
with her, and that she had left him alone at the foot of the Horn. That he
could not be open with his mother, no one that knew her unreasoning
and stormy temper would have wondered; but the pitiful boy, who did
not like lying, actually congratulated himself that he had got through
without telling a downright falsehood. It would not have bettered
matters in the least had he disclosed to her the good advice Kirsty gave
him: she would only have been furious at the impudence of the hussey
in talking so to her son.
CHAPTER III
AT THE FOOT OF THE HORN
The region was like a waste place in the troubled land of dreams--a spot
so waste that the dreamer struggles to rouse himself from his dream,
finding it too dreary to dream on. I have heard it likened to 'the ill place,
wi' the fire oot;' but it did not so impress me when first, after long
desire, I saw it. There was nothing to suggest the silence of once
roaring flame, no half-molten rocks, no huge, honey-combed scoriae,
no depths within depths glooming mystery and ancient horror. It was
the more desolate that it moved no active sense of dismay. What I saw
was a wide stretch of damp-looking level, mostly of undetermined or of
low-toned colour, with here and there a black spot, or, on the margin,
the brighter green of a patch of some growing crop. Flat and wide, the
eye found it difficult to rest upon it and not sweep hurriedly from
border to border for lack of self-asserted object on which to alight. It
looked low, but indeed lay high; the bases of the hills surrounding it
were far above the sea. These hills, at this season a ring of dull-brown
high-heaved hummocks, appeared to make of it a huge circular basin,
miles in diameter, over the rim of which peered the tops and peaks of
mountains more distant. Up the side of the Horn, which was the loftiest
in the ring, ran a stone wall, in the language of the country a
dry-stane-dyke, of considerable size, climbing to the very top--an ugly
thing which the eye could not avoid. There was nothing but the grouse
to have rendered it worth the proprietor's while to erect such a
boundary to his neighbour's property, plentiful as were the stones ready
for that poorest use of stones--division.
The farms that border the hollow, running each a little way up the side
of the basin, are, some of them at least, as well cultivated as any in
Scotland, but Winter claims there the paramountcy, and yields to
Summer so few of his rights that the place must look forbidding, if not
repulsive, to such as do not live in it. To love it, I think one must have
been born there. In the summer, it is true, it has the character of
_bracing_, but can be such, I imagine, only to those who are pretty well
braced already; the delicate of certain sorts, I think it must soon brace
with the bands of death.
The region is in constant danger of famine. If the snow come but a little
earlier than usual, the crops lie green under it, and no store of meal can
be laid up in the cottages. Then, if the snow lie deep, the difficulty in
conveying supplies of the poor fare which their hardihood counts
sufficient, will cause the dwellers there no little suffering. Of course
they are but few. A white cottage may be seen here and there on the
southerly slopes of the basin, but hardly one in its bottom.
It was now summer, and in a month or two the landscape would look
more cheerful; the heather that covered the hills would no longer be
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