When I was a child in short-coats a spaewife came to the town-end, and
for a silver groat paid by my mother she riddled my fate. It came to
little, being no more than that I should miss love and fortune in
the sunlight and find them in the rain. The woman was a haggard,
black-faced gipsy, and when my mother asked for more she turned on her
heel and spoke gibberish; for which she was presently driven out of the
place by Tarn Roberton, the baillie, and the village dogs. But the
thing stuck in my memory, and together with the fact that I was a
Thursday's bairn, and so, according to the old rhyme, "had far to go,"
convinced me long ere I had come to man's estate that wanderings and
surprises would be my portion.

It is in the rain that this tale begins. I was just turned of eighteen,
and in the back-end of a dripping September set out from our moorland
house of Auchencairn to complete my course at Edinburgh College. The
year was 1685, an ill year for our countryside; for the folk were at
odds with the King's Government, about religion, and the land was full
of covenants and repressions. Small wonder that I was backward with my
colleging, and at an age when most lads are buckled to a calling was
still attending the prelections of the Edinburgh masters. My father had
blown hot and cold in politics, for he was fiery and unstable by
nature, and swift to judge a cause by its latest professor. He had cast
out with the Hamilton gentry, and, having broken the head of a dragoon
in the change-house of Lesmahagow, had his little estate mulcted in
fines. All of which, together with some natural curiosity and a family
love of fighting, sent him to the ill-fated field of Bothwell Brig,
from which he was lucky to escape with a bullet in the shoulder.
Thereupon he had been put to the horn, and was now lying hid in a den
in the mosses of Douglas Water. It was a sore business for my mother,
who had the task of warding off prying eyes from our ragged household