'None!'
'No friends—eh?'
'None.'
'Nothing you can sell?'
'Nothing!'
'Then, take my advice, and quietly quit the glen altogether; there are plenty of counting-rooms, offices, and shops in the Lowlands, where such great sturdy fellows as you may easily make yearly, triple the rent of this old tumble-down place, with its patch of potatoes and corn. Quit your gun and fishing-rod—betake yourself to some honest and industrious occupation, instead of indulging in the very sophistry of vanity, and in wandering about these hills the livelong day, sighing over an imaginary past and an impossible future. No man has any right in the soil but such as the law gives him. Why, Mr. Allan, before I was half your age, I was one of the smartest writer's clerks in Glasgow, earning my threepence a page of a hundred and twenty-five words; but perhaps you would prefer a shopman's place—'
The shout with which Rob Roy greeted honest Bailie Jarvie's proposal to take his two sons as apprentices, was nothing to the shrill cry of anger with which my mother interrupted the sneer I was too poor to resent with pride—besides in its soundness, the advice of Snaggs humbled, while it exasperated me.
'I would rather see my boy Allan buried in his grave at the Stones of St. Colme than truckling to a Lowland dog like you, Ephraim Snaggs! Begone, lest I smite you on the face, weak though my hand, for recommending a calling so vile to Mac Innon of Glen Ora!'
'Mother, mother!' I exclaimed, 'what can I do?'
'Shoulder a musket and march to fight the Russians, if God opens up no brighter or better path to the son of a line that led their hundreds to battle in the times of old!' was the fierce and Spartan response.