Sometimes these hunts lasted as long as three or four days. Naturally, the dogs were unwilling to come back to the disgrace which awaited them, and they could subsist in the meantime on the spoil which they caught and slew. The neighbourhood of the great wide moor and fragment of forest—a broad brown and dark green tract stretching, with a suggestion of wonder and mystery, along the whole expanse of cultivated country—rendered it specially difficult to discover the direction the dogs had taken, running as the birds flew, and making nothing of hedges, ditches, and “dykes” in their progress, after they were fairly out of sight. It was the solving of a puzzle to pursue and apprehend them. Sometimes a wayfarer passed and recognised them, and brought the tidings of their whereabouts to “the farm town.” Sometimes the dogs’ master, when he went to the weekly market in the quaint town I have described, received information from a neighbour which enabled him to track the fugitives. Oftenest they returned of their own accord, spent and sated, brought back by some compulsion of law, some tie of dependence and affection, which was in the end too powerful for their desire to rove, so that they could not become wild dogs again, or desert their aggrieved human friends for a permanence. Knowing the district as I do, I have great sympathy with Wallace and Dick. Had I possessed Wallace’s capacity of endurance, or Dick’s youthful fleetness of foot and length of wind—had I shared their relish for hares and rabbits, torn limb from limb, and their capacity of thriving on the same—I too should have liked to wander for days among these fresh fields, with their yellowing corn or rich pasture, on which sturdy bullocks or skittish colts were having a pleasant time. I could have dived with good-will into these tree-girdled quarries, and roamed along these high roads, ample enough for two coaches-and-six to drive abreast, and bordered with bands of yellow lady’s bedstraw and azure veronica, and later in the season by miniature forests of nodding harebells; or down these rough by-roads, with their patches of yellow broom and trailing garlands of brambles, to the outlying heather on the verge of the moor, about which great humble bees were always humming. My heart would have hankered, like theirs, for that grand, gaunt old moor of Mendrummond—or, as it is called in local parlance, “Munrummon”—with its pale liverwort and white grass of Parnassus, its bronze stemmed firs and stunted oaks, its lone green glades. One can still feel that here, as among the mountains of old Scotland, there linger vestiges of a virgin world. As a human being and not a dog, I am not at all clear that I should have returned so faithfully to cutting reproaches and a good beating as Wallace and Dick had the courage to do.