Gilian The Dreamer: His Fancy, His Love and Adventure

The Paymaster and his two brothers lived with sister Mary on the upper flats of the biggest house of the burgh. The lower part was leased to an honest merchant whose regular pay...

Only for a single sleepless night was Gilian dashed by this evidence that the world was not made up of Miss Nan and himself alone. Depressions weighed on him as briefly as the k...

He had ideas of his own as to how this enterprise should be conducted, but on Nan’s advice he had gone about it in the fashion of Marget Maclean’s novels, even to the ladder. It...

Gilian was in a great dread, but revealed none of it in the half dusk of the room where he faced the two brothers as they sat at either side of the table. The General took out a...

Maam House stands mid-way up the Glen, among pasture and arable land that seems the more rich and level because it is hemmed in by gaunt hills where of old the robber found a se...

Gilian, meanwhile, sat on a high chair in Miss Mary’s room. She gave him soup till her ladle scraped against the bottom of the tureen; she cut for him the tenderest portions of...

He followed them to the square, still with the drums pounding and the fifes shrilling, and now the town was awake in every window. At a word the Colonel on his horse dispelled t...

It was a great town for supper parties. To make up, as it were, for the lost peat-side parliaments or supper nights that for their fore-folk made tolerable the quiet glens, the...

Miss Mary bustled about her kitchen with a liveliness that might have deceived any one but Gilian, who knew her to be in a tremendous perturbation. She clattered among pans, wre...

All the glen came to the funeral, and people of Lochowside on either side from Stronmealachan to Eredine, and many of the folk of Glen Shira and the town. A day of pleasant weat...

There was no moon, but the sky hung thick with stars, and the evening was a rare dusk where bush and tree stood half revealed, things sinister, concealing the terrific elements...

Gilian went up to his attic, stood looking blankly from the window at the skylights on the other side of the street, his head against the camecil of the room. He was bewildered...

Old Elasaid met them at the door. She was a woman with eyes profound and piercing under hanging brows, a woman grey even to the colour of her cheeks and the checks of the gown t...

“In his house indeed!” cried Jean, her eyes still red with weeping. “It is easy to see you are from the glen, when at this time of day you would be for seeking a gentleman soldi...

Miss Mary, in great tribulation, was waiting on them at the stair-foot, her face, with all its trouble in dark and throbbing lines, lit up by the lamp above the merchant’s door....

In the fulness of time, Gilian attained to the highest class in old Brooks’ school, pushed up thereto by no honest application of his own, but by the luck that attends on such a...

If the lambs were still wailing when Gilian got back to Ladyfield he never heard them. Was the glen as sad and empty as before? Then he was absent, indeed! For he was riding thr...

It has always happened that the first steps of a boy from the glen have been to the quay. There the ships lie clumsily on their bulging sides in the ebb till the tar steams and...

Nan’s uncle, moving with hopeless and dragging steps about the sides of Maam hill, ruminating constantly on nature’s caprice with sheep and crop, man’s injustice, the poverty of...

The vessel, straining at the rope that bound her to the shore, lay with a clumsy shoulder over the bank that shelved abruptly into the great depths where slimy weeds entangled....

The town was dripping at its eaves and glucking full of waters at rone-mouths and syvers when he got into it after his disgraceful retreat He was alone in the street as he walke...

Rain was beating on the open leaf of plane and beech, and rapping at the black doors of the ash-bud, and the scent of the gean-tree flourish hung round the road by the river, va...

When Gilian came down the stair and to the mouth of the pend close, he stood with some of the shyness of his childhood that used to keep him swithering there with a new suit on,...

That there was some unusual agitation in the town Gilian could gather as soon as he had set foot within the Arches in the early morning. It was in the air, it was mustering many...

AS he spoke he staggered to the side, and would have fallen but for his sister’s readiness. About that tall rush of a brother she quickly placed an arm and kept him on his feet...

It was on a day in a month of August he went to town to escape the lamentation of the new-weaned lambs, that made the glen sorrowful from Camus to Kincreggan. A sound pleasant i...

I think that in the trees, the dryads, the leaf-haunters invisible, so sad in childlessness, ceased their swinging to look upon the boy and girl so enviable in their innocence a...

When the General died, the household in the high burgh land suffered a change marvellous enough considering how little that old man musing in his parlour had had to do for years...

“The clash in the kirkyard is worth half a dozen sermons,” say the unregenerate, and though no kirkyard is about the Zion of our parish, the people are used to wait a little bef...

Her father was at the door when she went in. Now for the first time she knew the reason for his change of manner lately, for that bustle about trivial affairs when she was near,...

Marget Maclean (or one of her sisters) was accustomed when the mails contained a letter on His Majesty’s Service for the Paymaster, to put on a bonnet, and in a mild flurry cros...

And the same spirit, martial, poetic, make-believe, stayed with Gilian up till the Friday. It was hard indeed to escape it, for was not the town about him in a ferment of antici...

When he had gone and was no farther than the shoulder of the brae lying between the hut and Little Fox, and there was no longer any chance of his turning to repeat his wild adie...

The town bell rang, the little shops were shuttered. Miss Mary, with a new cap on to do justice to the occasion, had sat for hours with Gilian at the window, waiting; the Cornal...

“Black darkness came down on the wood of Creag Dubh, and there was I lost in the middle of it, picking my way among the trees. Fir and oak are in the wood. In the oak I could wa...

Fair day in the town, and cattle roved about the street, bellowing, the red and shaggy fellows of the moors, mourning in Gaelic accent and with mild large eyes pondering on the...