THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
Galloway train. There was a man on the platform whose looks I didn't like, but he never glanced at me, and when I caught sight of myself in the mirror of an automatic ma- chine, I didn't wonder. With my brown face, my old tweeds and my slouch I was the very model of one of the hill farmers who were crowding into the third-class carriages.
I travelled with half a dozen in an atmosphere of shag and clay pipes. They had come from the weekly market, and their mouths were full of prices. I heard accounts of how the lambing had gone up the Cairn and the Deuch and a dozen other mysterious waters. Above half the men had lunched heavily and were highly flavoured with whisky, but they took no notice of me. We rumbled slowly into a land of little wooded glens and then to a great, wide moorland place, gleaming with lochs, with high, blue hills showing northwards.
About five o'clock the carriage had emptied and I was left alone as I had hoped. I got out at the next station, a little place whose
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