Page 95 - the-thirty-nine-steps

gave me a warm new plaid for it, and an old hat of her man’s.
She showed me how to wrap the plaid around my shoulders,
and when I left that cottage I was the living image of the
kind of Scotsman you see in the illustrations to Burns’s po-
ems. But at any rate I was more or less clad.
It was as well, for the weather changed before midday to
a thick drizzle of rain. I found shelter below an overhanging
rock in the crook of a burn, where a drift of dead brackens
made a tolerable bed. There I managed to sleep till night-
fall, waking very cramped and wretched, with my shoulder
gnawing like a toothache. I ate the oatcake and cheese the
old wife had given me and set out again just before the dark-
ening.
I pass over the miseries of that night among the wet hills.
There were no stars to steer by, and I had to do the best I
could from my memory of the map. Twice I lost my way,
and I had some nasty falls into peat-bogs. I had only about
ten miles to go as the crow flies, but my mistakes made it
nearer twenty. The last bit was completed with set teeth and
a very light and dizzy head. But I managed it, and in the
early dawn I was knocking at Mr Turnbull’s door. The mist
lay close and thick, and from the cottage I could not see the
highroad.
Mr Turnbull himself opened to me sober and something
more than sober. He was primly dressed in an ancient but
well-tended suit of black; he had been shaved not later than
the night before; he wore a linen collar; and in his left hand
he carried a pocket Bible. At first he did not recognize me.
‘Whae are ye that comes stravaigin’ here on the Sabbath

95