“Why? First, because a two-ton caravan is too much for even two such horses as you have, considering the hills you will have to encounter; and, secondly,” he added with a sly smile, “because Scotchman never ‘gang back.’”
I seized that little world-wise editor just above the elbow. He looked beseechingly up at me.
“Let go?” he cried; “your fingers are made of iron fencing; my arm isn’t.”
“Can you for one moment imagine,” I said, “what the condition of this England of yours would be were all the Scotchmen to be suddenly taken out of it; suddenly to disappear from great cities like Manchester and Liverpool, from posts of highest duty in London itself, from the Navy, from the Army, from the Volunteers? Is the bare idea not calculated to induce a more dreadful nightmare than even a lobster salad?”
“I think,” said the editor, quietly, as I released him, “we might manage to meet the difficulty.”
But despite the dark forebodings of my neighbours and the insinuations of this editor, here I am in bonnie Scotland.
“My foot in on my native heath,
And my name is—”
Well, the reader knows what my name is.
I have pleasant recollections of my last day or two’s drive in Northumberland north, just before entering my native land.
Say from the Blue Bell Hotel at Belford. What a stir there was in that pretty little town, to be sure! We were well out of it, because I got the Wanderer brought to anchor in an immensely large stackyard. There was the sound of the circus’s brass band coming from a field some distance off, the occasional whoop-la! of the merry-go-rounds and patent-swing folks, and the bang-banging of rifles at the itinerant shooting galleries; but that was all there was to disturb us.