“A love story pure and simple—one of the old-fashioned, wholesome, sunshiny kind, with a pure-minded, sound-hearted hero, and a heroine who is merely a good and beautiful woman; and if any other love story half so sweet has been written this year it has escaped our notice.”—New York Times.
New York: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
THE STANDARD BEARER
BY
S. R. CROCKETT
AUTHOR OF
THE LILAC SUNBONNET, BOG-MYRTLE AND PEAT,
CLEG KELLY, LADS’ LOVE, THE RAIDERS, ETC.
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1898
Copyright, 1897, 1898,
By S. R. CROCKETT.
GRATEFULLY AND RESPECTFULLY
I DEDICATE
TO THE GOOD AND KINDLY FOLK
OF MY NATIVE PARISH OF BALMAGHIE
THIS RENDERING OF
STRANGE HAPPENINGS AMONG THEIR FOREBEARS,
OF WHICH THEY HAVE
NOT YET QUITE LOST THE MEMORY.
THE FOREWORD.
A book iron-grey and chill is this that I have written, the tale of times when the passions of men were still working like a yeasty sea after the storms of the Great Killing. If these pages should chance to be read when the leaves are greening, they may taste somewhat unseasonably in the mouth. For in these days the things of the spirit had lost their old authority without gaining a new graciousness, and save for one man the ancient war-cry of “God and the Kirk” had become degraded to “The Kirk and God.”