Guy Mannering.

254'WAVERLEY NOVELS.
Brown, meanwhile, proceeded northward at a round
pace along the moorish tract called the Waste of Cumberland. He passed a solitary house, towards which the
horseman who preceded him had apparently turned up,
for his horse's tread was evident in that direction. A
little farther, he seemed to have returned again into the
road. MIr. Dinmont had probably made a visit there
either of business or pleasure.-I wish, thought Brown,
the good farmer had staid till I came up; I should not
have been sorry to ask him a few questions about the
road, which seems to grow wilder and wilder.
In truth, nature, as if she had designed this tract of
country to be the barrier between two hostile nations, has
stamped upon it a character of wildness and desolation.
The hills are neither high nor rocky, but the land is all
heath and morass; the huts poor and mean, and at a
great distance from each other. Immediately around
them there is generally some little attempt at cultivation;
but a half-bred foal or two, straggling about with shackles
on their hind legs, to save the trouble of enclosures,
intimate the farmer's chief resource to be the breeding
of horses. The people, too, are of a ruder and more
inhospitable class than elsewhere to be found in Cumberland, arising partly from their own habits, partly from
their intermixture with vagrants and criminals, who make
this wild country a refuge from justice. So much were
the men of these districts in early times the objects of
suspicion and dislike to their more polished neighbours,
that there was, and perhaps still exists, a by-law of the
corporation of Newcastle, prohibiting any freeman of that
city to take for apprentice a native of certain of these
dales. It is pithily said, " Give a dog an ill name and
hang him;" and it may be added, if you give a man, or