FullReads

I

O nest, leaf-hidden, Dryad’s green alcove,

Half-islanded by hill-brook’s seaward rush,

My lovers still bower, where none may come but I!

Where in clear morning prime and high noon hush

With only some old poet’s book I lie!

Sometimes a lonely dove

Calleth her mate, or droning honey thieves

Weigh down the bluebell’s nodding campanule;

And ever singeth through the twilight cool

Low voice of water and the stir of leaves.

II

Perfect are August’s golden afternoons!

All the rough way across the fells, a peal

Of joy-bells ring, not heard by alien ear.

The jealous brake and close-shut beech conceal

The sweet bower’s queen and mine, albeit I hear

Hummed scraps of dear old tunes,

I push the boughs aside, and lo, I look

Upon a sight to make one more than wise,–

A true maid’s heart, shining from tender eyes,

Rich with love’s lore, unlearnt in any book.

” Memory Harvest.”

“An’ what brings the lang-leggit speldron howkin’ an’ scrauchlin’ owre the Clints o’ Drumore an’ the Dungeon o’ Buchan?” This was a question which none of Roy Campbell’s audience felt able to answer. But each grasped his rusty Queen’s-arm musket and bell-mouthed horse-pistol with a new determination. The stranger, whoever he might be, was manifestly unsafe. Roy Campbell had kept the intruder under observation for some time through the weather-beaten ship’s prospect-glass which he had stayed cumbrously on the edge of a rock. The man was poking about among rocks and debris at the foot of one of the cliffs in which the granite hills break westward towards the Atlantic.

Roy Campbell, the watcher, was a grey-headed man, slack in the twist but limber in the joints–distinguished by a constant lowering of the eye and a spasmodic twitching of the corners of the mouth. He was active and nimble, and in moments of excitement much given to spitting Gaelic oaths like a wild-cat. But, spite his half-century of life, he was still the best and the most daring man of a company who had taken daring as their stock-in-trade.

It was in the palmy days of the traffic with the Isle of Man, when that tight little island supplied the best French brandy for the drouthy lairds of half Scotland, also lace for the “keps” and stomachers of their dames, not to speak of the Sabbath silks of the farmer’s goodwife, wherein she brawly showed that she had as proper a respect for herself in the house of God as my lady herself.

Solway shore was a lively place in those days, and it was worth something to be in the swim of the traffic; ay, or even to have a snug farmhouse, with perhaps a hidden cellar or two, on the main trade-routes to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Much of the stuff was run by the “Rerrick Nighthawks,” gallant lads who looked upon the danger of the business as a token of high spirit, and considered that the revenue laws of the land were simply made to be broken–an opinion in which they were upheld generally by the people of the whole countryside, not excepting even those of the austere and Covenanting sort.

How Roy Campbell had found his way among the Westland Whigs is too long a story to be told–some little trouble connected with the days of the ’45, he said. More likely something about a lass. Suffice it that he had drawn himself into hold in a lonely squatter shieling deep among the fastnesses of the Clints o’ Drumore. He had built the house with his own hands. It was commonly known to the few who ventured that way as “The Back o’ Beyont.” In the hills behind the hut, which itself lay high on the brae-face, were many caves, each with its wattling of woven wicker, over which the heather had been sodded, so that in summer and autumn it grew as vigorously as upon the solid hill-side. Here Roy Campbell, late of Glen Dochart, flourished exceedingly, in spite of all the Kennedys of the South.