At this I protested so strongly that I think she believed me honest,
for she took the money and gave me a warm new plaid for it, and
an old hat of her man's. She showed me how to wrap the plaid
around my shoulders, and when I left that cottage I was the living
image of the kind of Scotsman you see in the illustrations to
Burns's poems. But at any rate I was more or less clad.
It was as well, for the weather changed before midday to a thick
drizzle of rain. I found shelter below an overhanging rock in the
crook of a burn, where a drift of dead brackens made a tolerable
bed. There I managed to sleep till nightfall, waking very cramped
and wretched, with my shoulder gnawing like a toothache. I ate the
oatcake and cheese the old wife had given me and set out again just
before the darkening.
I pass over the miseries of that night among the wet hills. There
were no stars to steer by, and I had to do the best I could from my
memory of the map. Twice I lost my way, and I had some nasty
falls into peat-bogs. I had only about ten miles to go as the crow
flies, but my mistakes made it nearer twenty. The last bit was
completed with set teeth and a very light and dizzy head. But I
managed it, and in the early dawn I was knocking at Mr Turnbull's
door. The mist lay close and thick, and from the cottage I could
not see the highroad.
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