"Much, Newton?"
"Yes, my dear sir."
"Stuff! fitted you out for the lancers—that is all."
"You have done more than that, uncle——"
"I have lodged the purchase money for your troop with Messrs. Cox and Co.; but most of this money must, under other circumstances, have been spent on your cousins, had they lived. So, thank fate and the fortune of war, not me, boy, not me. But there are times, especially when I am alone, that it grieves me to think that instead of leaving an heir to the old title, one boy lies in his grave in the old kirk yonder; and the other, far, far away on the battle-field of Goojerat."
He shook his white head, and his voice became tremulous, his chin sank on his breast, and he added—
"My poor Nigel!—my bonnie Archie!"
The baronet was a handsome man, above six feet in height, and, though he stooped a little now, had been erect as a pike. He possessed fine aquiline features, a ruddy and healthy complexion; clear, and bright dark grey eyes; a well-shaped, though not very small, mouth; and a Scottish chin, of a curve that evinced perseverance and decision. His hair was nearly white, but there was plenty of it; his hands, though browned by exposure and seldom gloved—for the gun, the rod, the riding-whip, and the curling stone were ever in them by turns—were well shaped, and showed by their form and nails that he was a gentleman of good blood and breeding. His plain costume I have described, and he was without ornament, save a silver dog-whistle at his button-hole, and a large gold signet-ring, which belonged to his grandfather, Sir Alexander Calderwood, who commanded a frigate under Admiral Hawke, in the fleet which, in 1748, fought and vanquished the Spanish galleons between Tortuga and the Havannah.
A sturdy old Fifeshire laird, proud of a long line of warlike Scottish ancestors, uncrossed by any taint of foreign blood, he was fond of boasting that neither Dane nor Norman—the Englishman's strange vaunt and pride—could be found among them; but that he came of a race, which—as our Highlanders forcibly phrase it—had sprung from the soil, and were indigenous to it.
But, indeed, the alleged foreign descent of nearly the whole Scottish aristocracy is a silly sham, existing in their own imagination, having arisen from the ignorance of the monkish Latin writers, who in rolls and histories prefixed the Norman de or le, in many instances, to the most common Celtic patronymics and surnames.