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Updated: May 7, 2025
He proceeded to the hill, and having dropped the parcel there, retired hurriedly. On his way home, nevertheless, he was overtaken by D. Fittis, who had been cutting down whins. Fittis had seen the parcel fall, and running after Gavin, returned it to him. Gavin thanked D. Fittis, and then sat down gloomily on the cemetery dyke. Half an hour afterwards he flung the parcel into a Tillyloss garden.
You, Jem Collier, keep a look-out ahead we'll meet them at the High Whins, or Brotthole bottom, or nowhere. Go a furlong ahead, I say, and look sharp. These Misses Arthurets feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, and such-like acts which my poor father used to say were filthy rags, but he dressed himself out with as many of them as most folk. D n that stumbling horse!
On one side of the road stretched the brown bog, with here and there a pool of water in it which shone bright in the colours of the setting sun. It was gay, too, with patches of yellow buttercups, of primroses, and golden whins. The whins had been in bloom since Easter, for Larry and Eileen had gathered the yellow flowers to dye their Easter eggs.
The whins within view burst into blossom; and the morning breeze which dried the dews wafted their fragrance. Then the brooding mists drew off under the increasing warmth of the sun; and the lady discovered that there was a lake within view a wide expanse, winding away among mountains till it was lost behind their promontories.
"A hundred years ago, it would have some tattered skin, of peat, of heather and dwarf whins, with the sand cropping out only here and there. So one has to figure it in Soltikof's day, before the conies ruined it. Which was not till within the last sixty years, as appears. Probably not unlike what the surrounding Country still is.
Once more, the theory of ambulatory somnambulism does not account for his hacked hat and bloody band found near the whins on the road beyond Ebrington. Nor does his own story account for them. He was stabbed in the side and thigh, he says. This would not cut his hat or ensanguine his band.
Every hotel barroom swarmed with persuasive salesmen bearing lumps of ore with which to entice unwary capital. All the talk was of "pay-streaks," "leads," "float," "whins," and "up-raises," while in the midst of it, battling to save souls, the zealous Salvation Army band paraded to and fro with frenzied beating of drums.
But the sun had sunk behind the moor where the broom was only budding, and the last sea-mew had flown to its scaur, and the smouldering whins had leaped up into the first yellow flame of the bonfires, and the more shifting, fantastic, brilliant banners of the aurora borealis shot across the frosty sky, before the first faint shout announced that Staneholme and his lady had come home.
Though somewhat repaired, it still remains only the ruins of their former town. Except in the houses of the better sort, they have no chimnies, so that we were very much incommoded by the smoke during our stay at that place. Their fuel is turf, which they have very good, together with whins or furze.
By a kind of irony of fortune, which Smith would have grimly appreciated, the only stone to perpetuate his fame stands upon a little heap of rocks in the sea; upon which it is only an inference that he ever set foot, and we can almost hear him say again, looking round upon this roomy earth, so much of which he possessed in his mind, "No lot for me but Smith's Isles, which are an array of barren rocks, the most overgrowne with shrubs and sharpe whins you can hardly passe them: without either grasse or wood but three or foure short shrubby old cedars."
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