HIGHLAND MARY [Illustration: “Highland Mary.”] HIGHLAND MARY The Romance of a Poet A NOVEL By CLAYTON MACKENZIE LEGGE Illustrated by WILLIAM KIRKPATRICK [Illustration] 1906 C. M. CLARK PUBLISHING CO. BOSTON Copyright, 1906. THE C. M. CLARK PUBLISHING CO., Boston, Mass. Entered at Stationer’s Hall, London. Dramatic and all other RIGHTS RESERVED. TO THE REV. DR. DONALD SAGE MACKAY, D.D., _Pastor of the Collegiate Church_, NEW YORK CITY. I RESPECTFULLY DEDICATE THIS BOOK FOREWORD With apologies to Dame History for having taken liberties with some of her famous characters, I would ask the Reader to remember that this story is fiction and not history. I have made use of some of the most romantic episodes in the life of Robert Burns, such as his courtship of Mary Campbell and his love affair with Jean Armour, “the Belle of Mauchline,” and many of the historical references and details are authentic. But my chief purpose in using these incidents was to make “Highland Mary” as picturesque, lovable and interesting a character in Fiction as she has always been in the History of Scotland. CLAYTON MACKENZIE LEGGE. HIGHLAND MARY CHAPTER I In the “but” or living-room (as it was termed in Scotland) of a little whitewashed thatched cottage near Auld Ayr in the land of the Doon, sat a quiet, sedate trio of persons consisting of two men and a woman. She who sat at the wheel busily engaged in spinning was the mistress of the cot, a matronly, middle-aged woman in peasant’s cap and ’kerchief. The other two occupants of the room for years had been inseparable companions and cronies, and when not at the village inn could be found sitting by the fireside of one of their neighbors, smoking their pipes in blissful laziness. And all Ayrshire tolerated and even welcomed Tam O’Shanter and his cronie, “Souter Johnny.” Tam was an Ayrshire farmer, considered fairly well-to-do in the neighborhood, while Souter (shoemaker) Johnny was the village cobbler, who seldom, if ever, worked at his trade nowadays. All the afternoon had they sat by the open fireplace, with its roomy, projecting chimney, watching the peat burn, seldom speaking, smoking their old smelly pipes, and sighing contentedly as the warmth penetrated their old bones.