GUY MANNERING
WHERE WE TOLD THE SECOND TALE
Summer there had been none. Autumn was a mockery. The golden harvest fields lay prostrate under drenching floods of rain. Every burn foamed creamy white in the linns and sulked peaty brown in the pools. The heather, rich in this our Galloway as an emperor's robe, had scarce bloomed at all. The very bees went hungry, for the lashing rain had washed all the honey out of the purple bells.
Nevertheless, in spite of all, we were again in Galloway—that is, the teller of tales and his little congregation of four. The country of Guy Mannering spread about us, even though we could scarce see a hundred yards of it. The children flattened their noses against the blurred window-panes to look. Their eyes watered with the keen tang of the peat reek, till, tired with watching the squattering of ducks in farm puddles, they turned as usual upon the family sagaman, and demanded, with that militant assurance of youth which succeeds so often, that he should forthwith and immediately "tell them something."
The tales from Waverley had proved so enthralling that there was a general demand for "another," and Sir Toady Lion, being of an arithmetical turn of mind, proclaimed that there was plenty of material, in so much as he had counted no fewer than twenty-four "all the same" upon the shelf before he left home.
Thus, encouraged by the dashing rain on the windows and with the low continual growl of Solway surf in our ears, we bent ourselves to fill a gap in a hopeless day by the retelling of