Project Gutenberg's Scottish sketches, by Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

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Title: Scottish sketches

Author: Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

Release Date: December 28, 2004 [EBook #14494]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCOTTISH SKETCHES ***

Produced by Ted Garvin, Amy and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading
Team

SHORT STORY

Scottish Sketches

By
AMELIA E. BARR

New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1898

COPYRIGHT, 1883,
BY
AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY.

CONTENTS

CRAWFORD'S SAIR STRAIT 7

JAMES BLACKIE'S REVENGE 101

FACING HIS ENEMY 163

ANDREW CARGILL'S CONFESSION 241

ONE WRONG STEP 267

LILE DAVIE 309

Crawford's Sair Strait.

CRAWFORD'S SAIR STRAIT.

CHAPTER I.

Alexander Crawford sat reading a book which he studied frequently with
a profound interest. Not the Bible: that volume had indeed its place
of honor in the room, but the book Crawford read was a smaller one; it
was stoutly bound and secured by a brass lock, and it was all in
manuscript. It was his private ledger, and it contained his bank
account. Its contents seemed to give him much solid satisfaction; and
when at last he locked the volume and replaced it in his secretary, it
was with that careful respect which he considered due to the
representative of so many thousand pounds.

He was in a placid mood, and strangely inclined to retrospection.
Thoughtfully fingering the key which locked up the record of his
wealth, he walked to the window and looked out. It was a dreary
prospect of brown moor and gray sea, but Crawford loved it. The bare
land and the barren mountains was the country of the Crawfords. He had
a fixed idea that it always had been theirs, and whenever he told
himself--as he did this night--that so many acres of old Scotland were
actually his own, he was aggressively a Scotchman.

"It is a bonnie bit o' land," he murmured, "and I hae done as my
father Laird Archibald told me. If we should meet in another warld
I'll be able to gie a good account o' Crawford and Traquare. It is
thirty years to-n