Kate Carnegie

by Ian Maclaren

Excerpt from CHAPTER II. PEACE. HE last stage now, Kit; in less than two houis we'll see Tochty woods. The very thought makes me a boy again, and it seems yesterday that I kissed your mother on the door-step of the old lodge and went off to the Crimean war. " That 's Muirtown Castle over there in the wood ? a grand place in its way, but nothing to our home, lassie. Kilspindie ? he was Viscount Hay then ? joined me at Muirtown, and we fought through the weary winter. He left the army after the war, with lots of honour. A good fellow was Hay, both in the trenches and the messroom. " I Ve never seen him since, and I dare say he 's forgotten a battered old Indian. Besides, he 's the big swell in this district, and I 'm only a poor Hielant laird, with a wood and a tumble-down house and a couple of farms." " You are also a shameless hypocrite and deceiver, for you believe that the Carnegies are as old as the Hays, and you know that, though you have only two farms, you have twelve medals and seven wounds. What does money matter? it simply makes people vulgar." " Nonsense, lassie; if a Carnegie runs down money, it's because he has got none and wishes he had. If you and I had only a few hundreds a year over the half- pay to rattle in our pockets, we should have lots of little pleasures, and you might have lived in England, with all sorts of variety and comfort, instead of wandering about India with a gang of stupid old chaps who have been so busy fighting that they never had time to read a book." "You mean like yourself, dad, and V. C. and Colonel Kinloch ? Where could a girl have found finer company than with my Knights of King Arthur? And do you dare to insinuate that I could have been content away from the regiment, that made me their daughter after mother died, and the army? ...

358 pages, Nook

First published April 1, 2005

About the author

Rev. John Watson, known by his pen name Ian Maclaren, was a Scottish author and theologian. He was born in Manningtree, Essex, and educated at Stirling and at Edinburgh University, later studying theology at New College, Edinburgh, and at Tübingen.

In 1874 he became a minister of the Free Church of Scotland and assistant minister of Edinburgh Barclay Church. Subsequently he was minister at Logiealmond in Perthshire and at Glasgow, and in 1880 he became minister of Sefton Park Presbyterian Church, Liverpool, from which he retired in 1905.

Maclaren's first stories of rural Scottish life, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894), achieved extraordinary popularity, selling more than 700 thousand copies, and were succeeded by other successful books, The Days of Auld Lang Syne (1895), Kate Carnegie and those Ministers (1896), and Afterwards and other Stories (1898). He is now considered to be one of the principal writers of the Kailyard school, characterized by sanitised and sentimental representations or rural life.

Under his own name John Watson published several volumes of sermons, among them being The Upper Room (1895), The Mind of the Master (1896) and The Potter's Wheel (1897).