CHAPTER III.
A HOME OF MANY GENERATIONS.
It was the custom of the former time to construct roads on a straight line, with a preference for uphill and down, and engineers refused to make a circuit of twenty yards to secure level ground.

There were two advantages in this uncompromising principle of construction, and it may be doubtful which commended itself most to the mind of our fathers.
Roads were drained after the simplest fashion, because a standing pool in the hollow had more than a compensation in the dryness of the ascent and descent, while the necessity of sliddering down one side and scrambling up the other reduced driving to the safe average of four miles an hour--horse-doctors forming a class by themselves, and being preserved in their headlong career by the particular Providence which has a genial regard for persons who have too little sense or have taken too much liquor.

Degenerate descendants, anxious to obtain the maximum of speed with the minimum of exertion, have shown a quite wonderful ingenuity in circumventing hills, so the road between Drumtochty Manse and Tochty Lodge gate was duplicated, and the track that plunged into the hollow was now forsaken of wheeled traffic and overgrown with grass.
"This way, Kate; it's the old road, and the way I came to kirk with my mother.

Yes, it's narrow, but we'll get through and down below--it is worth the seeing." So they forced a passage where the overgrown hedges resisted the wheels, and the trees, wet with a morning shower, dashed Kate's jacket with a pleasant spray, and the rail of the dog-cart was festooned with tendrils of honeysuckle and wild geranium.
"There is the parish kirk of Drumtochty," as they came out and halted on the crest of the hill, "and though it be not much to look at after the Norman churches of the south, it's a brave old kirk in our fashion, and well set in the Glen." For it stood on a knoll, whence the ground sloped down to the Tochty, and it lay with God's acre round it in the shining of the sun.

Half a dozen old beeches made a shadow in the summer-time, and beat off the winter's storms.