emperance hotel, where old Brown bashed the proprietor for refusing to
supply him gin); one Pepper's Ghost; one Wild Beasts' Show; one
Exhibition of the Fattest Woman on the Earth; also in the precincts of
one jail, where Mr. Patrick Brown was cruelly incarcerate for wiping the
floor with the cold refuser of the gin. "Criffens! Fechars!" said Swipey
for a twelvemonth after, stunned by the mere recollection of that home
of the glories of the earth. And then he would begin to expatiate for
the benefit of young Gourlay--for Swipey, though his name was the base
Teutonic Brown, had a Celtic contempt for brute facts that cripple the
imperial mind. So well did he expatiate that young Gourlay would slink
home to his mother and say, "Yah, even Swipey Broon has been to Fechars,
though my faither 'ull no allow _me_!" "Never mind, dear," she would
soothe him; "when once you're in the business, you'll gang a'where. And
nut wan o' them has sic a business to gang intill!"

But though he longed to go here and there for a day, that he might be
able to boast of it at home, young Gourlay felt that leaving Barbie for
good would be a cutting of his heart-strings. Each feature of it, town
and landward, was a crony of old years. In a land like Barbie, of quick
hill and dale, of tumbled wood and fell, each facet of nature has an
individuality so separate and so strong that if you live with it a
little it becomes your friend, and a memory so dear that you kiss the
thought of it in absence. The fields are not similar as pancakes; they
have their difference; each leaps to the eye with a remembered and
peculiar charm. That is why the heart of the Scot dies in flat southern
lands; he lives in a vacancy; at dawn there is no Ben Agray to nod
recognition through the mists. And that is why, when he gets north of
Carlisle, he shouts with glee as each remembered object sweeps on the
sight: yonder's the Nith with a fisherman hip-deep jigging at his rod,
and yonder's Corsoncon with the mist on his brow. It is less the
totality of the place than the individual feature that pulls at the
heart, and it was the individual feature that pulled at young Gourlay.
With intellect little or none, he had a vast, sensational experience,
and each aspect of Barbie was working in his blood and brain. Was there
ever a Cross like Barbie Cross? Was there ever a burn like the Lintie?
It was blithe and heartsome to go birling to Skeighan in the train; it
was grand to jouk round