HUNTINGTOWER

BY JOHN BUCHAN



To W. P. Ker.

If the Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford has not
forgotten the rock whence he was hewn, this simple story may give an
hour of entertainment. I offer it to you because I think you have
met my friend Dickson McCunn, and I dare to hope that you may even
in your many sojournings in the Westlands have encountered one or
other of the Gorbals Die-Hards. If you share my kindly feeling for
Dickson, you will be interested in some facts which I have lately
ascertained about his ancestry. In his veins there flows a portion
of the redoubtable blood of the Nicol Jarvies. When the Bailie,
you remember, returned from his journey to Rob Roy beyond the
Highland Line, he espoused his housekeeper Mattie, "an honest man's
daughter and a near cousin o' the Laird o' Limmerfield." The union
was blessed with a son, who succeeded to the Bailie's business and
in due course begat daughters, one of whom married a certain
Ebenezer McCunn, of whom there is record in the archives of the
Hammermen of Glasgow. Ebenezer's grandson, Peter by name,
was Provost of Kirkintilloch, and his second son was the father of
my hero by his marriage with Robina Dickson, oldest daughter of one
Robert Dickson, a tenant-farmer in the Lennox. So there are
coloured threads in Mr. McCunn's pedigree, and, like the Bailie,
he can count kin, should he wish, with Rob Roy himself through
"the auld wife ayont the fire at Stuckavrallachan."