Young Drumsheugh--young only in years, for his father had died long before Balcairnie’s father, and the laird had grown up under the rule of a widowed mother--was a scion of the great house of Dalwolsie, the representative of a family of respectable though not very wealthy country gentry that had held up their heads among their equals for the last three hundred years at least. Young Balcairnie, though his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had been tenants of Balcairnie as long as the oldest living man in the neighbourhood could recollect, knew nothing further of his origin than what was to be deciphered on a few mossy stones leaning over in Craigture kirk yard. These did not condescend to mention whether the Homes of Balcairnie came of the great Berwickshire Homes or not. The rude, half-effaced letters only gave the brief, if graphic, statement that here lay ‘the cauld corp’ of ‘Dauvit,’ or Alexander, or John Home, as it might be. But blue blood must have spoken out very unmistakably, if it had drawn a sharp line between two lads whose rearing, casts of mind, tastes and pursuits were so much in common. For the laird farmed the home farm, and the yeoman was one of the first in the hunting field, though he did not attend the hunt ball. The young men, like the boys, wore as a rule the same every-day suits--no longer of corduroy, but of home-spun. Good brown woollen stuff, shorn, spun, and woven in the district, diversified by yellow buckskins, boots and tops, red waistcoats, and three-cornered hats. The manly build of the pair rivalled each that of the other. Both were deep-chested, broad-shouldered, long and clean-limbed, with arms, not unused to fencing and boxing, quite capable of keeping the owners’ heads. The corresponding legs came out strong at coursing matches without the aid of riding horses, while the feet beat the floor resoundingly in reels and country dances for well-nigh a round of the clock at every merry-making, great and small, far and near. The comely ruddy faces under the three-cornered hats might almost have been those of brothers, except that Drumsheugh was dark and Balcairnie fair in hair and complexion. The men met at the kirk, they met at the market, they dined at the same table in the George Inn of the little town of Craigie on the market-day, they resorted to the same coffee-room to read the same newspaper, with its chronicle of war prices, victories of His Majesty’s forces abroad, and meal mobs at home, while the laird and the farmer frequently rode home together, so long as their roads were one.