"Sholto ——."
"Sholto!—that is rather an uncommon name, is it not?"
"I was called Sholto after a son of Lord Douglas. My father was Lord Douglas's gardener."
"How long have you been here?"
"I came over with my father about five years, ago." (In 1832.)
"How came your father to emigrate?"
"My father was one of the commuted pensioners, as they call them.[10] He was an old soldier in the veteran battalion, and he sold his pension of fivepence a day for four years and a grant of land, and came out here. Many did the like."
"But if he was gardener to Lord Douglas, he could not have suffered from want."
"Why, he was not a gardener then; he was a weaver; he worked hard enough for us. I remember often waking in the middle of the night, and seeing my father working still at his loom, as if he would never give over, while my mother and all of us were asleep."
"All of us!—how many of you?"