The Black Dwarf and a Legend of Montrose Author:Sir Walter Scott General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1880 Original Publisher: G. Routledge Subjects: Scotland Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Historical Fiction / Literary History / General History / Europe / Great Britain Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Travel ... more »/ Europe / Great Britain Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE BLACK DWARF. CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARY. Hast any philosophy in thee, Shepherd ? . As You Like it. It was a fine April morning (excepting that it had snowed hard the night before, and the ground remained covered with a dazzling mantle of six inches in depth) when two horsemen rode up to the Wallace Inn. The first was a strong, tall, powerful man, in a grey riding-coat, having a hat covered with wax-cloth, a huge silver- mounted horse-whip, boots, and dreadnought overalls. He was mounted on a large strong brown mare, rough in coat, but well in condition, with a saddle of the yeomanry cut, and a double-bitted military bridle. The man who accompanied him was apparently his servant; he rode a shaggy little grey pony, had a blue bonnet on his head, and a large check napkin folded about his neck, wore a pair of long blue worsted hose instead of boots, had his gloveless hands much stained with tar, and observed an air of deference and respect towards his companion, but without any of those indications of precedence and punctilio which are preserved between the gentry and their domesties. On the contrary, the two travellers entered the court-yard abreast, and the concluding sentence of the conversation which had been carrying on betwixt them was a joint ejaculation, " Lord guide us, an this weather last, what will come o' the...« less