Drawn from life Author:Archibald Forbes Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. rPHERE was a grand dinner-party at Sir -- Dugald Grant's. Sir Dugald was a gaunt, upright old warrior, seamed with many a scar and adorned with m... more »any a medal and clasp. He was the representative of an old but reduced Highland family, which a devotion to the wrong side in the '45 and a subsequent course of misfortune had reduced to a very low ebb. Dugald, when a lad of fourteen, had got a pair of colours through the interest of the chief of the clan, and was sent out into the world with his mother's blessing and a fifty-poundnote. From Walcheren to Corunna, from Torres Vedras to Toulouse, he had slowly carved his way up the ladder of promotion with his good sword and his fiery but discreet Scotch courage. He was a colonel at Waterloo, then a brigadier under Lord Gough in India, where he lost his leg and won his K.C.B.-ship. He had always been a saving man, and when he was finally put on the retired list, he had money enough to buy the old house of his family, and to maintain himself on a footing with the country gentry of his neighbourhood. Many a man would have liked a newer and more commodious residence than Feshiedale, but to Sir Dugald it was a loved and sacred spot—the house of his forefathers in its pristine integrity. It not a little resembled Sir Dugald himself in its outward characteristics —tall, grey, and narrow as it was. Therewas not the sign of a tree or shrub near it. It rose in all its naked gauntness out of the middle of a heathery field, with its peaked slated roof, with little quaint pepper-boxes at each corner, and a turret, at the foot of which was the principal entrance, and up which wound the narrow tortuous staircase. The house was but one room broad, and every window in the front had a corresponding one at the back, so that there was no found...« less