Produced by David Widger THE SHOES OF FORTUNE HOW THEY BROUGHT TO MANHOOD LOVE ADVENTURE AND CONTENT AS ALSO INTO DIVERS PERILS ON LAND AND SEA IN FOREIGN PARTS AND IN AN ALIEN ARMY PAUL GREIG OF THE HAZEL DEN IN SCOTLAND ONE TIME PURSER OF 'THE SEVEN SISTERS' BRIGANTINE OF HULL AND LATE LIEUTENANT IN THE REGIMENT D'AUVERGNE ALL AS WRIT BY HIM AND NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME SET FORTH By Neil Munro Illustrated by A. S. Boyd THE SHOES OF FORTUNE CHAPTER I NARRATES HOW I CAME TO QUIT THE STUDY OF LATIN AND THE LIKE, AND TAKE TO HARD WORK IN A MOORLAND COUNTRY It is an odd thing, chance--the one element to baffle the logician and make the scheming of the wisest look as foolish in the long run as the sandy citadel a child builds upon the shore without any thought of the incoming tide. A strange thing, chance; and but for chance I might this day be the sheriff of a shire, my head stuffed with the tangled phrase and sentiment of interlocutors, or maybe no more than an advocate overlooked, sitting in John's Coffeehouse in Edinburgh--a moody soured man with a jug of claret, and cursing the inconsistencies of preferment to office. I might have been that, or less, if it had not been for so trifling a circumstance as the burning of an elderly woman's batch of scones. Had Mistress Grant a more attentive eye to her Culross griddle, what time the scones for her lodgers, breakfast were a-baking forty years ago, I would never have fled furth my native land in a mortal terror of the gallows: had her griddle, say, been higher on the swee-chain by a link or two, Paul Greig would never have foregathered with Dan Risk, the blackguard skipper of a notorious craft; nor pined in a foreign jail; nor connived, unwitting, at a prince's murder; nor marched the weary leagues of France and fought there on a beggar's wage. And this is not all that hung that long-gone day upon a woman's stair-head gossip to the neglect of her _cuisine_, for had this woman been more diligent at her baking I had probably never seen my Isobel with a lover's eye. Well, here's one who can rarely regret the past except that it is gone. It was hard, it was cruel often; dangers the most curious and unexpected beset me, and I got an insight to deep villainies whereof man may be capable; yet on my word, if I had the parcelling out of a second life for myself, I think I would have it not greatly differing from the first, that seems in God's providence like to end in the parish where it started, among kent and friendly folk. I would not swear to it, yet I fancy I would have Lucky Grant again gossiping on her stair-head and her scones burned black, that Mackellar, my fellow-lodger, might make me once more, as he used to do, the instrument of his malcontent.