Port in Stranryan, or a boat's crew was seen making for the beach of any
of the Back Shore coves, messengers, ragged and brown, sped inland to
warn the farms and villages engaged in the business, or even those
merely acting as recipients and depots. Then, in the twinkling of an
eye, all men under forty-five disappeared from the fields. The teams
found their own way homewards or stood still till they were loosed by
girls hurrying out from the steadings.

"Patriotism," said Stair Garland, bitterly, "that is a fine word. But
the fine patriots tie the lads they catch to rings in the wall of the
Stranryan gaol. They lash them till the blood runs just to learn them
not to complain. Don't tell me about glory. There was Rob Blair, who
came back from Spain after his brother Maxwell had been flogged to
death. He shot a general near Corunna--him they make a fuss about--he
and half a dozen of his mates, and he told me the reason that Allingham
keeps so far ahead of his own soldiers is that they are better shots
than the French, who do not fire at him nearly so often."

True or not, this was the Galloway idea of soldiering during the later
Napoleonic wars, and it was only after a bout of drunkenness at some
fair that recruits could be looked for. Suicide was not uncommon after a
few weeks of discipline, and many were drowned from the transport ships
which took them to Vigo or the Tagus mouth.

Galloway has always been cut off from the rest of Scotland. In spite of
the invasion of its fertile valleys by Ayrshire dairy farmers it has
remained the old Free Province, a little anti-Scottish, a good deal
anti-Irish, excessively anti-English, self-centred, self-satisfied,
quarrel-some and _frondeur_, yet in the main politically conservative.

In 1811 the Ayrshire invasion had not yet begun, and there was nothing
to mitigate the determination of the people not to send a single man to
fight in a war about which they cared nothing. No regiment in the
service bore its name. It was looked upon as the haunt of an evil breed
who would smuggle and fight, but against, and not among, the soldiers of
the King.

A landing party had been attacked and cut up on the Corse of Slakes.
Soldiers had to take and hold the old camp of the Levellers in the
Duchrae wood, near the Black Water. Bitter hatred prevailed between the
Lord Lieutenant's party, formed to aid the government in obtaining
recruits, and the commonalty, which was equally determined that n