A tall man even for Drumtochty, standing six feet three in his boots, who, being only a walking skeleton, ought to have weighed some twelve stone, but with the bone and breadth of him turned the scale at fifteen. His hair was a fiery red, and his bare, hard-featured face two shades darker. No one had ever caught a trace of the inner man on Posty's face, save once and for an instant--when he jumped into Kelpie's hole to save a wee lassie. Elspeth Macfadyen said afterwards “his eyes were graund.” He wore the regulation cap on the back of his head, and as no post-office jacket was big enough to meet on Posty's chest, he looped it with string over a knitted waistcoat. One winter he amazed the Glen by appearing in a waterproof cape, which a humanitarian official had provided for country postmen, but returned after a week to his former estate, declaring that such luxuries were unhealthy and certain to undermine the constitution. His watch was the size of a small turnip, and gave the authorised time to the district, although Posty was always denouncing it for a tendency to lose a minute in the course of summer, an irregularity he used to trace back to a thunderstorm in his grandfather's time. His equipment was completed by an oaken stick, which the smith shod afresh every third year, and which Posty would suddenly swing over his head as he went along. It was supposed that at these times he had settled a point of doctrine. Mrs. Robb started him with a score of letters, and the rest he gathered as he went. The upper Glen had a box with a lock, at the cross roads, and the theory was that each farm had one key and Posty his own. Every key except Posty's had been lost long ago, and the box stood open to the light, but Posty always made a vain attempt to sneck the door, and solemnly dropped the letters through the slit. Some farms had hidie holes in the dyke, which Posty could find in the darkest morning; and Hillocks, through sheer force of custom, deposited his correspondence, as his father had done before him, at the root of an ancient beech. Persons handing Posty letters considered it polite to hint at their contents, and any information about our exiles was considered Posty 's due. He was hardly ever known to make any remark, and a stranger would have said that he did not hear, but it was noticed that he carried the letters to Whinnie Knowe himself during George's illness, and there is no doubt that he was quite excited the day he brought the tidings of Professor Ross's recovery.