by John Buchan
HUNTINGTOWER
JOHN BUCHAN
_By_ JOHN BUCHAN
HUNTINGTOWER THE PATH OF THE KING MR. STANDFAST GREENMANTLE THE WATCHERS BY THE THRESHOLD SALUTE TO ADVENTURES PRESTER JOHN THE POWER HOUSE THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
HUNTINGTOWER
BY JOHN BUCHAN
NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
HUNTINGTOWER. II
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
W. P. KER
_If the Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford has notforgotten the rock whence he was hewn, this simple story may give him anhour of entertainment. I offer it to you because I think you have met myfriend Dickson McCunn, and I dare to hope that you may even in your manysojournings in the Westlands have encountered one or other of theGorbals Die-Hards. If you share my kindly feeling for Dickson, you willbe interested in some facts which I have lately ascertained about hisancestry. In his veins there flows a portion of the redoubtable blood ofthe Nicol Jarvies. When the Bailie, you remember, returned from hisjourney to Rob Roy beyond the Highland Line, he espoused his housekeeperMattie, "an honest man's daughter and a near cousin o' the Laird o'Limmerfield." The union was blessed with a son, who succeeded to theBailie's business and in due course begat daughters, one of whom marrieda certain Ebenezer McCunn, of whom there is record in the archives ofthe Hammermen of Glasgow. Ebenezer's grandson, Peter by name, wasProvost of Kirkintilloch, and his second son was the father of my heroby his marriage with Robina Dickson, eldest daughter of one RobertDickson, a tenant-farmer in the Lennox. So there are coloured threads inMr. McCunn's pedigree, and, like the Bailie, he can count kin, should hewish, with Rob Roy himself through "the auld wife ayont the fire atStuckavrallachan."_
_Such as it is, I dedicate to you the story, and ask for no betterverdict on it than that of that profound critic of life and literature,Mr. Huckleberry Finn, who observed of the_ Pilgrim's Progress, _that he"considered the statements interesting, but steep."_
J. B.
