With all the merits of a sanguine temper, our young English
drover was not without his defects. He was irascible, and sometimes to
the verge of being quarrelsome; and perhaps not the less inclined to
bring his disputes to a pugilistic decision, because he found few
antagonists able to stand up to him in the boxing-ring.
It is difficult to say how Henry Wakefield and Robin Oig first became
intimates; but it is certain a close acquaintance had taken place
betwixt them, although they had apparently few common topics of
conversation or of interest, so soon as their talk ceased to be of
bullocks. Robin Oig, indeed, spoke the English language rather
imperfectly upon any other topics but stots and kyloes, and Harry
Wakefield could never bring his broad Yorkshire tongue to utter a
single word of Gaelic. It was in vain Robin spent a whole morning,
during a walk over Minch-Moor, in attempting to teach his companion to
utter, with true precision, the shibboleth _Llhu_, which is the Gaelic
for a calf.
The pair of friends had traversed with their usual cordiality the
grassy wilds of Liddesdale, and crossed the opposite part of
Cumberland, emphatically called the Waste. In these solitary regions,
the cattle under the charge of our drovers subsisted themselves
cheaply, by picking their food as they went along the drove-road, or
sometimes by the tempting opportunity of a _start and owerloup_, or
invasion of the neighbouring pasture, where an occasion presented
itself.
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