It was always thus with me when alone: I must fall to moralising and self-communing. Still perhaps the master feeling in my mind was one of curiosity and lightheartedness. So I whistled, as I went, all the old tunes of my boyhood which I was wont to whistle when I went out to the hills with my rod and gun, and stepped briskly over the short heather, and snapped my fingers in the face of the world. Now I dared not go back to Tweeddale by the way by which I had come, for the Clyde valley above Abington would be a hunting-ground of dragoons for many days. There was nothing for it but to make for the lower waters, ford the river above Coulter, and then come to Tweeddale in the lower parts, and thence make my way to the Water of Cor. Even this course was not without its dangers; for the lower glen of Tweed was around Dawyck and Barns, and this was the very part of all the land the most perilous to me at the moment. To add to this, I was well at home among the wilder hills; but it was little I knew of Clydesdale below Abington, till you come to the town of Lanark. This may at first seem a trifling misfortune, but in my present case it was a very great one. For unless a man knows every house and the character of its inmates he is like to be in an ill way if close watched and threatened. However, I dreaded this the less, and looked for my troubles mainly after I had once entered my own lands in Tweeddale. At the time when the sun rose I was on a long hill called Craigcraw, which hangs at the edge of the narrow crack in the hills through which goes the bridle-road from Lanark to Moffat. I thought it scarce worth my while to be wandering aimlessly among mosses and craigs when something very like a road lay beneath me; so I made haste to get down and ease my limbs with the level way. It was but a narrow strip of grass, running across the darker heath, and coiling in front like a green ribbon through nick or scaur or along the broad brae-face. Soon I came to the small, roofless shieling of Redshaw, where aforetime lived a villain of rare notoriety, with whose name, "Redshaw Jock," Jean Morran embittered my childhood. I thought of all these old pleasing days, as I passed the bare rickle of stones in the crook of the burn. Here I turned from the path, for I had no desire to go to Abington, and struck up a narrow howe in the hills, which from the direction I guessed must lead to the lower Clyde. It was a lonesome place as ever I have seen. The spring sunshine only made the utter desolation the more apparent and oppressive. Afar on the hillside, by a clump of rowan trees, I saw the herd’s house of Wildshaw, well named in its remote solitude. But soon I had come to the head of the burn and mounted the flat tableland, and in a little came to the decline on the other side, and entered the glen of the Roberton Burn.