Page:Scott - Tales of my Landlord - 3rd series, vol. 1 - 1819.djvu/301

charge of a small brook into the sea, and was hidden from the castle, to which it had been in former times an appendage, by the intervention of the shoulder of a hill forming a projecting headland. It was called Wolf's-hope, (i. e. Wolf's Haven) and the few inhabitants gained a precarious subsistence by manning two or three fishing boats in the herring season, and smuggling gin and brandy during the winter months. They paid a kind of hereditary respect to the lords of Ravenswood; but, in the difficulties of the family, most of the inhabitants of Wolf's-hope had contrived to get feu-rights to their little possessions, their huts, kail-yards, and rights of commonty, so that they were emancipated from the chains of feudal dependence, and free from the various exactions with which, under every possible pretext, or without pretext at all, the Scottish landlords of the period, themselves in great poverty, were wont to harass their still poorer tenants at will. They might be, on the whole, termed independent, a circumstance pe-