Chapter 4

I was drawing nearer and nearer home; and now my heart beat high and happily. Every local feature and casual sound, the little thatched cottages, with rusty, antique risps on their doors,[*] and the clatter of the wooden looms within, were familiar to me. We swept past the quaint town, and the tall, gaunt castle of Clackmannan, where its aged chatelaine--the last of the old Bruce line--_knighted_ Robert Burns, with the sword of the victor of Bannockburn, saying, dryly, that she "had a better right to do it than _…