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Updated: June 12, 2025
I do not go out to park-dikes, and to steadings, and to market-towns, to have herds and cottars and burghers pull off their bonnets to me as they do to Major Melville o' Cairnvreckan, and ca' me laird, or captain, or honour; no; my sma' means, whilk are not aboon twenty thousand merk, have had the blessing of increase, but the pride of heart has not increased with them; nor do I delight to be called captain, though I have the subscribed commission of that gospel-searching nobleman, the Earl of Glencairn, in whilk I am so designated.
As the two came down from the high moors, tracking cautiously through the woods and stray belts of culture which hung about the thatched steadings and shy, deep-hidden farm-towns, a wildness awoke in Stair Garland. The little mare, Derry Down, responded to his mood. She held her head high, and capered like an unbitted yearling fresh off the first spring pastures.
It stretched illimitably, and though there were dotted over it red barns and grey houses and knots of trees growing in fellowship as they do round steadings, and though its colour was a deep wet fertile green, it did not seem as if it could be a human territory. It could be regarded only as a place for the feet of the clouds which, half as tall as the sky, stood on the far horizon.
"You're a damnable kind of busybody, sir, the breed of fellow that plunges states into revolutions. Why, in Heaven's name, did you not consult me?" "Because it was wiser not to," I said stoutly. "Half my recruits are old soldiers of Bacon. If the trouble blows past, they go back to their steadings and nothing more is heard of it.
But when we came to go through their country, and to see their bonny little steadings, and the douce quiet folk at work in the fields, and the women knitting by the roadside, and the old granny with a big white mutch smacking the baby to teach it manners, it was all so home-like that I could not think why it was that we had been hating and fearing these good people for so long.
'Friend, said Gilfillan, with a more complacent voice than he had hitherto used, 'honour not me. I do not go out to park-dikes and to steadings and to market-towns to have herds and cottars and burghers pull off their bonnets to me as they do to Major Melville o' Cairnvreckan, and ca' me laird or captain or honour.
All the same, it would be a very long time before I got back what I meant to spend on drains and steadings. Besides, the repairs and improvements need not be made just yet, and I might be able to use the money and earn a good profit first." "You might lose it all," Mrs. Osborn insisted. "Gerald is rash and business men don't tell young bank-clerks important secrets.
I have said the Weald was ever a wild and inhuman place where only few men could go together, without great towns and with only infrequent villages; not a thick or impenetrable woodland but a difficult and a lonely country sparsely scattered with steadings. Well, it is such places that the Carthusians have ever sought out for their houses, such was Witham and such was the Grande Chartreuse also.
'Friend, said Gilfillan, with a more complacent voice than he had hitherto used, 'honour not me. I do not go out to park-dikes and to steadings and to market-towns to have herds and cottars and burghers pull off their bonnets to me as they do to Major Melville o' Cairnvreckan, and ca' me laird or captain or honour.
And many herdsmen of the steadings wilt thou vex in the mountain glens, when in lust for flesh thou comest on the herds and sheep thick of fleece. Nay come, lest thou sleep the last and longest slumber, come forth from thy cradle, thou companion of black night! For surely this honour hereafter thou shalt have among the Immortals, to be called for ever the captain of reivers."
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