The Landlord Of The Inn Took Me, After I Had Eaten, To An Adjoining Cafe,
Where I, Or Rather My Journey, Became The Topic Of The Afternoon.
Every
one had some suggestion for my guidance; and the sub-prefectorial map was
fetched from the sub-prefecture itself, and much thumbed among coffee-
cups and glasses of liqueur.
Most of these kind advisers were
Protestant, though I observed that Protestant and Catholic intermingled
in a very easy manner; and it surprised me to see what a lively memory
still subsisted of the religious war. Among the hills of the south-west,
by Mauchline, Cumnock, or Carsphairn, in isolated farms or in the manse,
serious Presbyterian people still recall the days of the great
persecution, and the graves of local martyrs are still piously regarded.
But in towns and among the so-called better classes, I fear that these
old doings have become an idle tale. If you met a mixed company in the
King's Arms at Wigton, it is not likely that the talk would run on
Covenanters. Nay, at Muirkirk of Glenluce, I found the beadle's wife had
not so much as heard of Prophet Peden. But these Cevenols were proud of
their ancestors in quite another sense; the war was their chosen topic;
its exploits were their own patent of nobility; and where a man or a race
has had but one adventure, and that heroic, we must expect and pardon
some prolixity of reference. They told me the country was still full of
legends hitherto uncollected; I heard from them about Cavalier's
descendants - not direct descendants, be it understood, but only cousins
or nephews - who were still prosperous people in the scene of the
boy-general's exploits; and one farmer had seen the bones of old
combatants dug up into the air of an afternoon in the nineteenth century,
in a field where the ancestors had fought, and the great-grandchildren
were peaceably ditching.
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