“God is good!” said he again, no way reverently, but with some emotion. “I thought I had left for ever the place of hope, and here's Paradise with open doors.” Then he looked upon the nearer country, upon the wooded hills, the strenuous shoulders of the bens upholding all that glory of sinking sunshine, and on one he saw upstanding, a vulgar blotch upon the landscape, a gaunt long spar with an overhanging arm.
“Ah!” he said airily, “there is civilisation in the land after all.”
“Plenty of law at least,” said the Baron. “Law of its kind—MacCailen law. His Grace, till the other day, as it might be, was Justice-General of the shire, Sheriff of the same, Regality Lord, with rights of pit and gallows. My place goes up to the knowe beside his gallows; but his Grace's regality comes beyond this, and what does he do but put up his dule-tree there that I may see it from my window and mind the fact. It's a fine country this; man, I love it! I'm bound to be loving it, as the saying goes, waking and sleeping, and it brought me back from France, that I had no illwill to, and kept me indoors in the 'Forty-five,' though my heart was in the rising, as Be-thune would tell you. A grand country out and in, wet and dry, winter and summer, and only that tree there and what it meant to mar the look and comfort of it. But here I'm at my sentiments and you starving, I am sure, for something to eat.”
He moved from the window out of which he had been gazing with a fondness that surprised and amused his visitor, and called loudly for Mungo.
In a moment the little retainer was at the door jauntily saluting in his military manner.
“Hae ye been foraging the day, Mungo?” asked the master indulgently.
“Na, na, there was nae need wi' a commissariat weel provided for voluntary. Auld Dugald brought in his twa kain hens yesterday; ane's on the bank and the cauld corp o' the ither o' them's in the pantry. There's the end o' a hench o' venison frae Strathlachlan, and twa oors syne, when the tide was oot, there was beef padovies and stoved how-to wdies, but I gied them to twa gaun-aboot bodies.”
They both looked inquiringly at Count Victor.
“I regret the what-do-you-call-it?—the stoved howtowdy,” said he, laughing, “more for the sound of it than for any sense its name conveys to me.”
“There's meat as weel as music in it, as the fox said when he ate the bagpipes,” said Mungo.