Meg Merrilies waited till the first sun of the winter's morn had come, lest one of the revellers of the night should take it into his head to turn back. Then she led Brown by a difficult and precipitous path, till she could point out to him, on the other side of some dense plantations, the road to Kippletringan. "And here," said she, mysteriously putting a large leathern purse into his hand, "is what will in some degree repay the many alms your house has given me and mine!" She was gone before he could reply, and when Brown opened the purse, he was astonished to find in it gold to the amount of nearly one hundred pounds, besides many valuable jewels. The gipsy had endowed him with a fortune. INTERLUDE OF LOCALITY "And all this happened here?" repeated Sweetheart, incredulously, pointing up at the dark purple mountains of Screel and Ben Gairn. "Well," I answered, "Scott's Solway is the Dumfries Solway, not the Galloway Solway. Portanferry exists not far from Glencaple on the eastern bank of Nith, and the castle of Ellangowan is as like as possible to Caerlaverock." "But he _says_ Galloway!" objected Sweetheart, who has a pretty persistence of her own. "And I wanted Ellangowan to be in Galloway. What with Carlyle having been born there, the Dumfries folk have quite enough to be proud of!" "Yes, Scott _says_ Ellangowan is in Galloway," said I, "but nevertheless to any one who knows the country, it remains obstinately in Dumfries-shire. His swamps and morasses are those of Lochar. The frith is the Dumfries-shire Solway, the castle a Dumfries-shire castle, and what Scott put in of Galloway tradition was sent him by his friend the Castle Douglas exciseman." "Oh!" said Sweetheart, a little ruefully, "but are you sure?" "Certain," I answered, "if you consider time and distance from the border--say from Charlies-hope, you will see that Brown could not possibly have reached the heart of Galloway. Besides, Scott was far too wise a man to write about what he did not know. So he wove in Train's Galloway legends, but he put the people into his own well-kenned dresses, and set them to act their parts under familiar skies. Hence it is, that though the taste of Scott was never stronger than in _Guy Mannering_, the flavour of Galloway is somehow not in the mouth!" "What does it matter where it all happened?" cried Hugh John; "it is a rattling good tale, anyway, and if the Man-who-Wrote-It imagined that it all happened in Galloway, surely _we_ can!"