efence as for convenience. You
entered by a heavy gate and you closed it carefully after you. From
without the walls of the quadrangle frowned upon you unbroken from their
eminence, massy and threatening as a fortress. The walls were loopholed
for musketry, and, in places, still bore marks of the long slots through
which the archers had shot their bolts and clothyard shafts in the days
before powder and ball.

Except the single gate, you could go round and round without finding any
place by which an enemy might enter. The outside appearance was
certainly grim, unpromising, inhospitable, and so it seemed to Miss Irma
and Sir Louis as they drove up the loaning from the ford.

But within, everything was different. What a smiling welcome they
received, my grandfather standing with his hat off, my grandmother with
the tears in her motherly vehement eyes, gathering the two wanderers
defiantly to her breast as if daring all the world to come on. Behind a
little (but not much) was Aunt Jen, asserting her position and rights in
the house. She did not seem to see Miss Irma, but to make up, she never
took her eyes off the little boy for a moment.

Then my uncles were ranged awkwardly, their hands lonesome for the grip
of the plough, the driving reins, or the water-lever at the mill in the
woods.

Uncle Rob, our dandy, had changed his coat and put on a new neckcloth,
an act which, as all who know a Scots farm town will understand, cost
him a multitude of flouts, jeers and upcasting from his peers.

I was also there, not indeed to welcome them, but because I had
accompanied the party from the house of Marnhoul. The White Free Traders
had established a post there to watch over one of their best
"hidie-holes," even though they had removed all their goods in
expectation of the visit of a troop of horse under Captain Sinclair,
known to have been ordered up from Dumfries to aid the excise
supervisor, as soon as that zealous officer was sure that, the steed
being stolen, it was time to lock the stable door.

But when the dragoons came, there was little for them to do. Ned
Henderson, the General Surveyor of the Customs and head of the district
in all matters of excise, was far too careful a man to allow more to
appear than was "good for the country." He knew that there was hardly a
laird, and not a single farmer or man of substance who had not his
finger in the pie. Indeed, after the crushing national disaster of
Darien, this was th