‘What would I do that for?’ answered the hardy farmer; ’the best way’s to let the blood barken upon the cut; that saves plasters, hinney.’

Brown, who in his military profession had seen a great many hard blows pass, could not help remarking, ’he had never known such severe strokes received with so much apparent indifference.’

’Hout tout, man!  I would never be making a humdudgeon about a scart on the pow; but we’ll be in Scotland in five minutes now, and ye maun gang up to Charlie’s Hope wi’ me, that’s a clear case.’

Brown readily accepted the offered hospitality.  Night was now falling when they came in sight of a pretty river winding its way through a pastoral country.  The hills were greener and more abrupt than those which Brown had lately passed, sinking their grassy sides at once upon the river.  They had no pretensions to magnificence of height, or to romantic shapes, nor did their smooth swelling slopes exhibit either rocks or woods.  Yet the view was wild, solitary, and pleasingly rural.  No inclosures, no roads, almost no tillage; it seemed a land which a patriarch would have chosen to feed his flocks and herds.  The remains of here and there a dismantled and ruined tower showed that it had once harboured beings of a very different description from its present inhabitants; those freebooters, namely, to whose exploits the wars between England and Scotland bear witness.

Descending by a path towards a well-known ford, Dumple crossed the small river, and then, quickening his pace, trotted about a mile briskly up its banks, and approached two or three low thatched houses, placed with their angles to each other, with a great contempt of regularity.  This was the farm-steading of Charlie’s Hope, or, in the language of the country, ‘the town.’  A most furious barking was set up at their approach by the whole three generations of Mustard and Pepper, and a number of allies, names unknown.  The farmer [Footnote:  See Note 3.] made his well-known voice lustily heard to restore order; the door opened, and a half-dressed ewe-milker, who had done that good office, shut it in their faces, in order that she might run ‘ben the house’ to cry ‘Mistress, mistress, it’s the master, and another man wi’ him.’  Dumple, turned loose, walked to his own stable-door, and there pawed and whinnied for admission, in strains which were answered by his acquaintances from the interior.  Amid this bustle Brown was fain to secure Wasp from the other dogs, who, with ardour corresponding more to their own names than to the hospitable temper of their owner, were much disposed to use the intruder roughly.

In about a minute a stout labourer was patting Dumple, and introducing him into the stable, while Mrs. Dinmont, a well-favoured buxom dame, welcomed her husband with unfeigned rapture.  ‘Eh, sirs! gudeman, ye hae been a weary while away!’

CHAPTER XXIV