Patsy

shrubberies. He remembered still the quaint smell of the damp pine-needles on the ground, the bitterness of laurel leaves which he broke across the centre and nibbled

out brass pan after brass pan, with that worn spoon of horn warrant

her of the fighting services, so he took what of adventure the country afforded-the rustic merry-making of the "Kirn" in the days of harvest home, the coastwise adventure of shi

gh the great doors of the courtyard which had been shut t

o early in the morning. It is long since the days of the brass preserving-pan. Laddie, I'

od chatelaine like him the better, "I rode over to see Patsy F

uncle's are both as full of soldiers and ribaldry as ever in the times of the Covenant. So where should she com

d left the country. The reasons for her instinctive dislike of her uncle's guest were not clear to any except herself, but on these Louis did not insist. It was enough that Patsy was so minded. In any case he wished her to know that he would follow the movements of the en

ss, hill, and heather, which comes only after generations of practice. But against them they had a man infinitely subtle and wholly without scruple. Eben McClure was of t

e-carrier, as only a wayside accident. Now Galloway is half Celtic, and the other half, at least till the Ayrshire invasion, was mostly Norse. So McClure was hated with all the Celtic vehemence which does n

perfectly aware, and had ar

could be in turn an Irish drover, a Loch Fyne fisherman, a moor shepherd, a flourishing burgess of Lanark or Ruglen, even an enterprisin

on the gunshot from behind the hedge or the knife between his shoulders. He never now went to his own parish of Stonykirk where his father had been a well-doing packman-which is to say, a travelling merchant of silks and laces. McClure knew that he was in danger anywhere west of the Cree, but th

to take the pair which belonged to his host, or more easily still, Adam Ferris's in the north end of the Glen. If these were not regal enough, Earl Raincy had in his stables the finest horses in the county, and would certainly, though of old Jacobite stock, not

did any of the king's sons care for? There was but one such girl in the countryside. She had made the Duk

her had dipped their fingers pretty deeply in the traffic. There were caves and hiding-places, which it would be death to search except with a company of sappers. An

e kitchen of the farm of Glenanmays. He had wondered at the persistency with which the dog had followed the girl. At first

tugging at her apron-string and now licking her hand, McClure, a man of the country, began to suspect that the dog was a mess

t the moment all chasings of smugglers and expeditions in aid of the manning of the fleet were absolutely at a standstill. The Duke's arrival on the Britomart by way of Stran

y bristling like a thousand hedgehogs with all manner of thorn and gorse bushes, waved over with broom and darkened with undergrowth, any single clump of which might

w delayed Royalty and, incidentally, was stopping his business. If he could put the son of the King under a great obligation-he might at one stroke make his fortune and save his life. He had had enou