It had been six generations agone at a Highland banquet, in the days when the unrestrained temper of the time gave way to wild orgies, during which theological discussions raged with unrestrained fury.  Shamus McShamus, an embittered Calvinist, half crazed perhaps with liquor, had maintained that damnation could be achieved only by faith.  Whimper McWhinus had held that damnation could be achieved also by good works.  Inflamed with drink, McShamus had struck McWhinus across the temple with an oatcake and killed him.  McShamus had been brought to trial.  Although defended by some of the most skilled lawyers of Aucherlocherty, he had been acquitted.  On the very night of his acquittal, Whangus McWhinus, the son of the murdered man, had lain in wait for Shamus McShamus, in the hollow of the Glen road where it rises to the cliff, and had shot him through the bagpipes.  Since then the feud had raged with unquenched bitterness for a century and a half.

With each generation the difference between the two families became more acute.  They differed on every possible point.  They wore different tartans, sat under different ministers, drank different brands of whisky, and upheld different doctrines in regard to eternal punishment.

To add to the feud the McWhinuses had grown rich, while the McShamuses had become poor.

At least once in every generation a McWhinus or a McShamus had been shot, and always at the turn of the Glen road where it rose to the edge of the cliff.  Finally, two generations gone, the McWhinuses had been raised to sudden wealth by the discovery of a coal mine on their land.  To show their contempt for the McShamuses they had left the Glen to live in America.  The McShamuses, to show their contempt for the McWhinuses, had remained in the Glen.  The feud was kept alive in their memory.

And now the descendant of the McWhinuses had come back, and bought out the property of the Laird of Aucherlocherty beside the Glen.  Ian McWhinus knew nothing of the feud.  Reared in another atmosphere, the traditions of Scotland had no meaning for him.  He had entirely degenerated.  To him the tartan had become only a piece of coloured cloth.  He wore a kilt as a masquerade costume for a Hallowe’en dance, and when it rained he put on a raincoat.  He was no longer Scotch.  More than that, he had married a beautiful American wife, a talcum-powder blonde with a dough face and the exquisite rotundity of the packing-house district of the Middle-West.  Ian McWhinus was her slave.  For her sake he had bought the lobster from Hannah.  For her sake, too, he had scrutinised closely the beautiful Highland girl, for his wife was anxious to bring back a Scotch housemaid with her to Chicago.