His white face hung on Miss Lammie's looks, and haunted her steps from spence (store-room, as in Devonshire) to milk-house, and from milk-house to chessel, surmounted by the glory of his red hair, which a farm-servant declared he had once mistaken for a fun-buss (whin-bush) on fire.

This day she had gone to the field to see the first handful of barley cut, and Shargar was there, of course.
It was a glorious day of blue and gold, with just wind enough to set the barley-heads a-talking.

But, whether from the heat of the sun, or the pain of his foot operating on the general discouragement under which he laboured, Robert turned faint all at once, and dragged himself away to a cottage on the edge of the field.
It was the dwelling of a cottar, whose family had been settled upon the farm of Bodyfauld from time immemorial.

They were, indeed, like other cottars, a kind of feudal dependents, occupying an acre or two of the land, in return for which they performed certain stipulated labour, called cottar-wark.

The greater part of the family was employed in the work of the farm, at the regular wages.
Alas for Scotland that such families are now to seek! Would that the parliaments of our country held such a proportion of noble-minded men as was once to be found in the clay huts on a hill-side, or grouped about a central farm, huts whose wretched look would move the pity of many a man as inferior to their occupants as a King Charles's lap-dog is to a shepherd's colley.