Page:Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (Macmillan, 1897) (IA cu31924104001478).pdf/268

 this place, Glengyle, where we live, could have com- manded so many men who would have followed him to the death; and now there are none left.” It appeared that Mr. Macfarlane, and his wife’s brother, Mr. Macalpine, farmed the place, inclusive of the whole vale upwards to the mountains, and the mountains themselves, under the lady of Glengyle, the mother of the young laird, a minor. It was a sheep-farm.

Speaking of another neighbouring laird, they said he had gone, like the rest of them, to Edinburgh, left his lands and his own people, spending his money where it brought him not any esteem, so that he was of no value either at home or abroad. We mentioned Rob Roy, and the eyes of all glistened; even the lady of the house, who was very diffident, and no great talker, exclaimed, “He was a good man, Rob Roy! he had been dead only about eighty years, had lived in the next farm, which belonged to him, and there his bones were laid.”! He was a famous swordsman. Having an arm much longer than other men, he had a greater command with his sword. Asa proof of the length of his arm, they told us that he could garter his tartan stockings below the knee without stooping, and added a dozen different stories of single combats, which he had fought, all in perfect good-humour, merely to prove his prowess. J daresay they had stories of this kind which would hardly have been exhausted in the long evenings of a whole December week, Rob Roy being as famous here as ever Robin Hood was in the Forest of Sherwood ; 4e also robbed from the rich, giving to the poor, and defending them from oppression. They tell of his con-

1 There is a mistake here. His bones were laid about fifteen or twenty miles from thence, in Balquhidder kirkyard. But it was under the belief that his ‘‘ grave is near the head of Loch Ketterine, in one of those pinfold-like burial grounds, of neglected and desolate appearance, which the traveller meets with in the Highlands of Scotland,” that the well-known poem on od Roy's Grave was composed.—J. C. S.