But it was not till I had crossed the wide stream of the Douglas Water and begun to ascend the hills, that I wholly recovered my composure. Before, I had been straggling in low meadows which do not suit my temper, since I am above all things hill-bred and a lover of dark mountains. So now on the crisp spring grass of the slopes my spirits rose. Was not I young and strong and skilled in the accomplishments of a man? The world was before me--that wide, undiscovered world which had always attracted the more heroic spirits. What hardship was there to live a free life among the hills, under the sunshine and the wind, the clouds and the blue sky?
But my delight could never be unmixed though I tried. After all, was I free? I felt of a sudden that I was not one half equipped for a gipsy, adventurous life. I was tied down to custom and place with too many ties. I came of a line of landed gentlemen. The taint of possession, of mastery and lordship over men and land, was strong in me. I could not bring me to think of myself as a kinless and kithless vagabond, having no sure place of abode. Then my love of letters, my learning, my philosophy, bound me down with indissoluble bands. To have acquired a taste for such things was to have unfitted myself for ever for the life of careless vagabondage. Above all there was my love; and ever, as I went on, my thoughts came home from their aërial flights and settled more and more in a little room in a house in a very little portion of God's universe. And more and more I felt myself a slave to beloved tyrants, and yet would not have been free if I could.
It was always thus with me when alone: I must fall to moralising and self-communing. Still perhaps the master feeling in my mind was one of curiosity and lightheartedness. So I whistled, as I went, all the old tunes of my boyhood which I was wont to whistle when I went out to the hills with my rod and gun, and stepped briskly over the short heather, and snapped my fingers in the face of the world.
Now I dared not go back to Tweeddale by the way by which I had come, for the Clyde valley above Abington would be a hunting-ground of dragoons for many days. There was nothing for it but to make for the lower waters, ford the river above Coulter, and then come to Tweeddale in the lower parts, and thence make my way to the Water of Cor. Even this course was not without its dangers; for the lower glen of Tweed was around Dawyck and Barns, and this was the very part of all the land the most perilous to me at the moment. To add to this, I was well at home among the wilder hills; but it was little I knew of Clydesdale below Abington, till you come to the town of Lanark. This may at first seem a trifling misfortune, but in my present case it was a very great one. For unless a man knows every house and the character of its inmates he is like to be in an ill way if close watched and threatened. However, I dreaded this the less, and looked for my troubles mainly after I had once entered my own lands in Tweeddale.