"But he _says_ Galloway!" objected Sweetheart, who has a pretty persistence of her own. "And I wanted Ellangowan to be in Galloway. What with Carlyle having been born there, the Dumfries folk have quite enough to be proud of!"
"Yes, Scott _says_ Ellangowan is in Galloway," said I, "but nevertheless to any one who knows the country, it remains obstinately in Dumfries-shire. His swamps and morasses are those of Lochar. The frith is the Dumfries-shire Solway, the castle a Dumfries-shire castle, and what Scott put in of Galloway tradition was sent him by his friend the Castle Douglas exciseman."
"Oh!" said Sweetheart, a little ruefully, "but are you sure?"
"Certain," I answered, "if you consider time and distance from the border--say from Charlies-hope, you will see that Brown could not possibly have reached the heart of Galloway. Besides, Scott was far too wise a man to write about what he did not know. So he wove in Train's Galloway legends, but he put the people into his own well-kenned dresses, and set them to act their parts under familiar skies. Hence it is, that though the taste of Scott was never stronger than in _Guy Mannering_, the flavour of Galloway is somehow not in the mouth!"
"What does it matter where it all happened?" cried Hugh John; "it is a rattling good tale, anyway, and if the Man-who-Wrote-It imagined that it all happened in Galloway, surely _we_ can!"
This being both sensible and unanswerable, the party scattered to improvise old castles of Ellangowan, and to squabble for what was to them the only wholly desirable part, that of Dirk Hatteraick. The combat between the smuggler and the exciseman was executed with particular zeal and spirit, Sir Toady Lion prancing and curvetting, as Frank Kennedy, on an invisible steed, with Maid Margaret before him on the saddle. So active was the fight indeed, that the bold bad smuggler, Dirk, assailed as to the upper part of his body by Sir Toady, and with the Heir tugging at his legs, found himself presently worsted and precipitated over the cliff in place of Frank Kennedy. This ending considerably disarranged the story, so that it was with no little trouble that the pair of strutting victors were induced to "play by the book," and to accept (severally) death and captivity in the hold of the smuggling lugger.