But time pressed, as it ever does.  The hour came for us to leave, John Paul firmly refusing to remain the night in a house that belonged to Mr. Craik.  Of the tenderness, nay, of the pity and cruelty of that parting, I have no power to write.  We knelt with bowed heads while the mother prayed for the son, expatriated, whom she never hoped to see again on this earth.  She gave us bannocks of her own baking, and her last words were to implore me always to be a friend to John Paul.

Then we went out into the night and walked all the way to Dumfries in silence.

We lay that night at the sign of the “Twa Naigs,” where Bonnie Prince Charlie had rested in the Mars year(1715).  Before I went to bed I called for pen and paper, and by the light of a tallow dip sat down to compose a letter to my grandfather, telling him that I was alive and well, and recounting as much of my adventures as I could.  I said that I was going to London, where I would see Mr. Dix, and would take passage thence for America.  I prayed that he had been able to bear up against the ordeal of my disappearance.  I dwelt upon the obligations I was under to John Paul, relating the misfortunes of that worthy seaman (which he so little deserved!).  And said that it was my purpose to bring him to Maryland with me, where I knew Mr. Carvel would reward him with one of his ships, explaining that he would accept no money.  But when it came to accusing Grafton and the rector, I thought twice, and bit the end of the feather.  The chances were so great that my grandfather would be in bed and under the guardianship of my uncle that I forbore, and resolved instead to write it to Captain Daniel at my first opportunity.

I arose early to discover a morning gray and drear, with a mist falling to chill the bones.  News travels apace the world over, and that of John Paul’s home-coming and of his public renunciation of Scotland at the “Hurcheon” had reached Dumfries in good time, substantiated by the arrival of the teamster with the chests the night before.  I descended into the courtyard in time to catch the captain in his watchet-blue frock haggling with the landlord for a chaise, the two of them surrounded by a muttering crowd anxious for a glimpse of Mr. Craik’s gardener’s son, for he had become a nine-day sensation to the country round about.  But John Paul minded them not so much as a swarm of flies, and the teamster’s account of the happenings at Kirkcudbright had given them so wholesome a fear of his speech and presence as to cause them to misdoubt their own wit, which is saying a deal of Scotchmen.  But when the bargain had been struck and John Paul gone with the ’ostler to see to his chests, mine host thought it a pity not to have a fall out of me.

“So ye be the Buckskin laud,” he said, with a wink at a leering group of farmers; “ye hae braw gentles in America.”

He was a man of sixty or thereabout, with a shrewd but not unkindly face that had something familiar in it.