Wallace and Dick were north-country dogs, as is evidenced by the name of the first—he would have been Bevis in England. They dwelt within sight of a purple spur of the Grampians, known as the Braes of Angus. Their home was a hospitable farm-house, among fresh breezy uplands, with that element of breadth and freedom which belongs to hill countries, where, side by side with the cultivated fields, lies a wide moor and remnant of ancient forest, and where the ground is broken—and now falls gradually in a sunny slope—now dips abruptly into a shady dell, or den, as we call it in Scotland. The last is a place of spreading beeches, feathery larches, waving birks, and a great wealth of ferns and wild flowers in spring and early summer, and with a never-failing wimpling burn threading its recesses. It is quite distinct from a wild heathery glen. The neighbourhood to which I allude has quaint old mansions, some of which existed in the stirring times when the glens and dens served as passes for “John Hielandman,” rustling in his plaid and kilt, and bristling with his claymore and skene-dhu. He did not bring down cattle—long-horned kylies—like the modern drover, but came, saw, and lifted what “nowt” he fancied on lowland pastures, goading them up among the mountains to the headquarters of the chief and his dhuinnewassels. An ancient town with steep, narrow streets, having a feudal castle on a tree-crowned rock above a brawling river, and the remains of an abbey, is the market town of the district. On the road to this town one has a glimpse from a distance of the silver shield of the German ocean, with a larger town on its brink. Wallace and Dick could not have been more highly favoured in the matter of locality, though they had been lovers of the picturesque—not the picturesque on a stage scale, but the quality which is large and primitive—and though they had deliberately gratified their æsthetic tastes by pitching their tents in this region, which is fresh on the hottest summer day, and has a bracing keenness, not a chill sluggishness, in its winter cold. Wallace came first to the farm-house a tremendous puppy, for the most part generous and docile in his conscious power, but not without elements of savageness and danger in him, if he were suffered to grow up undisciplined.