Chapter I: Front Matter

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

In footnote number 1 (page 72) the author refers to a sketch on the frontispiece of the book. At the time of posting this book to Project Gutenberg, it was verified by the content provider that there is no frontispiece in this particular edition of Huntingtower.

In the plain-text version of this ebook italics are indicated by _underscores_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without comment. One example of an obvious typographical error is on page 237 where the word "shamefaceedly" was changed to "shamefacedly". Other than obvious typographical errors, the author's original spelling has been left intact. This includes the use of unconventional spelling and dialect.

Inconsistencies in the author's use of hyphens and accent marks have been left unchanged, as in the original text.

The following four changes were made to punctuation and spelling:

1. Page 96: An apostrophe was removed from the word "an'" in the
phrase "I've found a ladder, an auld yin" (an old one).

2. Page 100: A question mark was changed to a period in the phrase
"... he realised that he was in the presence of something the like
of which he had never met in his life before."

4. Page 187: An apostrophe was removed from the word "wing's" in
the phrase "... take the wings off a seagull."

HUNTINGTOWER

JOHN BUCHAN

_By_ JOHN BUCHAN

HUNTINGTOWER
THE PATH OF THE KING
MR. STANDFAST
GREENMANTLE
THE WATCHERS BY THE THRESHOLD
SALUTE TO ADVENTURES
PRESTER JOHN
THE POWER HOUSE
THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME

NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

HUNTINGTOWER

BY
JOHN BUCHAN

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

HUNTINGTOWER. II

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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 him 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, eldest 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."_

_Such as it is, I dedicate to you the story, and ask for no better verdict on it than that of that profound critic of life and literature, Mr. Huckleberry Finn, who observed of the_ Pilgrim's Progress, _that he "considered the statements interesting, but steep."_

J. B.

CONTENTS

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