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Updated: June 1, 2025
This was the farm-steading of Charlie's Hope, or, in the language of the country, 'the town. A most furious barking was set up at their approach by the whole three generations of Mustard and Pepper, and a number of allies, names unknown.
And sure enough, a rickyard it proved to be, and a neat little farm-steading, with the beech-woods growing almost to the door of it. Just before me, however, as I came up the path, the trees drew back and let in a wide flood of daylight on to a circular lawn. It was here that the noises had their origin.
The track which they were following led close past the large house above referred to, necessitating compliance with a custom of the country, which greatly surprised, and not a little amused, the Englishmen. We have spoken of the residence as a house, because it belonged to one owner, but it would be more correct to call it a farm-steading, or a group of buildings.
The windows were modern and large, so that the rooms were well lighted, and the view in all directions was magnificent. Wherever the eye turned, it met knolls, and mounds, and fields, and picturesque groves, with here and there a substantial farm-steading, or a little hamlet, with its modest church-spire pointing ever upwards to the bright sky.
We have before us two goodly octavos in which the little rustical comedy is enshrined in hundreds of pages of notes; and where the argument as to its localities, identifying every spot, occupies chapter after chapter of earnest discussion, proving exactly where every cottage is situated, and that New Hall, the home of the Forbeses, was the mansion of the poem, with its little farm-steading round.
Now they would pass through a farm-steading, perfumed with the breath of cows, and the odour of burning peat so fragrant! though not yet so grateful to the inner sense as it would be when encountered in after years and in foreign lands.
"They're safe enough. The fire'll no' touch them, an' besides, they're in the Lord's hands." A few minutes more and the whole farm-steading was in flames. The dragoons watched the work of destruction until the roof of the cottage fell in; then, mounting their horses, they descended to the road with the two prisoners and turned their faces in the direction of Edinburgh.
Descending by. a path towards a well-known ford, Dumple crossed the small river, and then quickening his pace, trotted about a mile briskly up its banks, and approached two or three low thatched, houses, placed with their angles to each other, with a great contempt of regularity. This was the farm-steading of Charlies-hope, or, in the language of the country, "the Town."
And then what wad a' the country about do for want o' auld Edie Ochiltree, that brings news and country cracks frae ae farm-steading to anither, and gingerbread to the lasses, and helps the lads to mend their fiddles, and the gudewives to clout their pans, and plaits rush-swords and grenadier caps for the weans, and busks the laird's flees, and has skill o' cow-ills and horse-ills, and kens mair auld sangs and tales than a' the barony besides, and gars ilka body laugh wherever he comes?
At a distance, the farm-steading looked like a little oasis of green, amid the grey stony slopes that surrounded it, and on a nearer approach not unlike the vestiges of a Celtic earthwork, with the tumulus of a hero or two in the centre, but the mounds turned out to be nothing more than the grass roofs of the house and offices, and the banks and dykes but circumvallations round the plot of most carefully cleaned meadow, called the "tun," which always surrounds every Icelandic farm.
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