"DIGNITY AND IMPUDENCE." 17

allude has quaint old mansions, some of which existed in the
stirring times when the glens and dens served as passes for
" John Hielandman," rustling in his plaid and kilt, and brist-
ling with his claymore and skene-dhu. He did not bring
down cattle-long-horned kylies-like the modern drover, but
came, saw, and lifted what nowt" he fancied on lowland
pastures, goading them up among the mountains to the head-
quarters of the chief and his dhuinnewassels. An ancient town
with steep, narrow streets, having a feudal castle on a tree-
crowned rock above a brawling river, and the remains of an
abbey, is the market town of the district. On the road to this
town one has a glimpse from a distance of the silver shield of
the German ocean, with a larger town on its brink.
 Wallace and Dick could not have been more highly
favoured in the matter of locality, though they had been lovers
of the picturesque-not the picturesque on a stage scale, but
the quality which is large and primitive-and though they had
deliberately gratified their esthetic tastes by pitching their
tents in this region, which is fresh on the hottest summer day,
and has a bracing keenness, not a chill sluggishness, in its
winter cold.
 Wallace came first to the farm-house a tremendous puppy,
for the most part generous and docile in his conscious power,
but not without elements of savageness and danger in him, if
he were suffered to grow up undisciplined.
 I have heard his master tell that, when Wallace was a
young dog, one winter night he took more than his own share
of the hearthrug, on which his master's solitary chair was also
drawn up. The man, desiring more space to move in, gave
the dog an unceremonious push, which roused in him such