Yet the view was wild, solitary, and pleasingly rural.

No inclosures, no roads, almost no tillage; it seemed a land which a patriarch would have chosen to feed his flocks and herds.

The remains of here and there a dismantled and ruined tower showed that it had once harboured beings of a very different description from its present inhabitants; those freebooters, namely, to whose exploits the wars between England and Scotland bear witness.
Descending by a path towards a well-known ford, Dumple crossed the small river, and then, quickening his pace, trotted about a mile briskly up its banks, and approached two or three low thatched houses, placed with their angles to each other, with a great contempt of regularity.

This was the farm-steading of Charlie's Hope, or, in the language of the country, 'the town.' A most furious barking was set up at their approach by the whole three generations of Mustard and Pepper, and a number of allies, names unknown.

The farmer [Footnote: See Note 3.] made his well-known voice lustily heard to restore order; the door opened, and a half-dressed ewe-milker, who had done that good office, shut it in their faces, in order that she might run 'ben the house' to cry 'Mistress, mistress, it's the master, and another man wi' him.' Dumple, turned loose, walked to his own stable-door, and there pawed and whinnied for admission, in strains which were answered by his acquaintances from the interior.