As a poet says, "Ah, no! it is not all delusion, That strange intelligence of sorrow Searching the tranquil heart's seclusion, Making us quail before the morrow.
'Tis the farewell of happiness departing, The sudden tremor of a soul at rest; The wraith of coming grief upstarting Within the watchful breast." He listened to David Cameron's reminiscences of his bonnie sister Jessie, and of the love match she had made with the great Highland chieftain, with an ill-disguised impatience.

He had a Lowlander's scorn for the thriftless, fighting, freebooting traditions of the Northern clans and a Calvinist's dislike to the Stuarts and the Stuarts' faith; so that David's unusual emotion was exceedingly and, perhaps, unreasonably irritating to him.

He could not bear to hear him speak with trembling voice and gleaming eyes of the grand mountains and the silent corries around Ben-Nevis, the red deer trooping over the misty steeps, and the brown hinds lying among the green plumes of fern, and the wren and the thrush lilting in song together.
"Oh, the bonnie, bonnie Hielands!" cried David with a passionate affection; "it is always Sabbath up i' the mountains, Christine.

I maun see them once again ere I lay by my pilgrim-staff and shoon for ever." "Then you are not Glasgow born, Mr.Cameron," said James, with the air of one who finds out something to another's disadvantage.
"Me! Glasgo' born! Na, na, man! I was born among the mountains o' Argyle.

It was a sair downcome fra them to the Glasgo' pavements.