M'Adam turned sharply on the old man.

"I said the wumman wears a muckle hat!" he snapped.

Blotted out as it was, the observation still remains--a tribute of
honest admiration. Doubtless the Recording Angel did not pass it
by. That one statement anent the gentle lady of the manor is the
only personal remark ever credited to little M'Adam not born of
malice and all uncharitableness. And that is why it is ever
memorable.

The little Scotsman with the sardonic face had been the tenant of
the Grange these many years; yet he had never grown acclimatized
to the land of the Southron. With his shrivelled body and weakly
legs he looked among the sturdy, straight-limbed sons of the
hill-country like some brown, wrinkled leaf holding its place midst
a galaxy of green. And as he differed from them physically, so he
did morally.

He neither understood them nor attempted to. The North-country
character was an unsolved mystery to him, and that after ten years'
study. "One-half o' what ye say they doot, and they let ye see it;
t'ither half they -disbelieve, and they tell ye so," he once said. And
that explained his attitude toward them, and consequently theirs
toward him.

He stood entirely alone; a son of Hagar, mocking. His sharp, ill
tongue was rarely still, and always bitter. There was hardly a. man
in the land, from Langholm How to the market-cross in
Grammoch-town, but had at one time known its sting, endured it in