This story of life in Scotland during the 1400s focuses on the simple things: unrequited love, true love blocked by circumstance, arrogant ambition, and unbounded jealousy, all accompanied by vengeful feuding between individuals and clans who'd made themselves masters of the struggle for revenge. . . .In 2014 The Galloway Raiders was set up as a literary society and online presence to explore Crockett's life and work and restore his credibility as one of Scotland's great writers. The Galloway Raiders also holds two archives of Crockett material.

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The night was hot in Paris. Breathless heat had brooded over the city all Saturday, the 23rd of August, 1572. It was the eve of Saint Bartholomew. The bell of Saint Germain l\'Auxerrois had just clashed out the signal. The Louvre was one blaze of lights. Men with lanterns and poleaxes, as if going to the shambles to kill oxen, hurried along the streets. Only in the houses in which were lodged the great Huguenot gentlemen, come to the city for the marriage of the King\'s sister Marguerite to the King of Navarre, there were darkness and silence. None had warned them—or, at least, they had taken no warning. If any suspected, the word of a King, his sworn oaths and multitudinous safe-conducts, lulled them back again into security. In one chamber, high above the courtyard, a light burned faint and steady. It was that beside the bed of the great Admiral—Coligny. He had been treacherously wounded by the arquebuse of one of the guard of the King\'s brother—Monsieur de France, Henry Duke of Anjou, afterwards to be known to history as Henry III., the favourite son of Catherine de Medici, the cunningest, and the most ungrateful.

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FROM LIKING TO LOVEIt was graying to the edge of dark upon one of the evenings towards the end of April, in the year 1688, when Walter Gordon, of Lochinvar in Galloway, and now for some time private in the Prince of Orange\'s Douglas regiment of dragoons, strode up the stairs of his cousin Will\'s lodging in the ancient Dutch city of Amersfort. The young man had come straight from duty at the palace, and his humor was not exactly gracious.But Wat Gordon could not long remain vexed in spirit in the presence of his cousin Will\'s wife, Maisie Lennox. Her still, sweet smile killed enmity, even as spring sunshine kills the bite of frost. The little, low-roofed Dutch room, panelled with oak, had its windows open towards the sun-setting, and there in the glow of the west two girls were sitting. At sight of them Walter Gordon stopped suddenly in the doorway as he came bursting in. He had been expecting to see but one—his cousin\'s young wife, into whose pretty ear of patientest sympathy he might pour his fretful boyish disappointments and much-baffled aspirations.Mistress Maisie Lennox, now for half a year Will Gordon of Earlstoun\'s wife (for by her maiden name she was still used to be called, and so she signed herself, since it had not yet become the custom for a women to take among her intimates the style of her husband\'s surname), sat on a high-backed chair by the oriel window. She had the kind of sunny hair which it is a pleasure to look upon, and the ripples of it made crisp tendrils about her brow. Her face underneath was already sweetening and gaining in reposefulness, with that look of matronhood which comes early to patient, gracious women, who would yet venture much for the man they love. And not once nor yet twice had Maisie Lennox dared all for those whom she loved—as has, indeed, elsewhere been told.CONTENTSForeword to the TaleFrom Liking to LoveWhy Kate Hated LochinvarThe Bull, the Calf, and the KillerThe Duel at the Inn of BrederodeHaxo the Bull InterferesThe Prince of OrangeMistress Maisie Lennox, DiplomatistThe Street of the ButcheryMy Lord of BarraThe Descent of AvernusThe Hearts of WomenThe Prison of AmersfortMy Lord of Barra\'s VowMaisie\'s Night QuestA Night of StormThe Breaking of the PrisonJack Scarlett Calls Himself a FoolA Perilous MeetingThe Battle of the DunesCaptain, My CaptainThe Good Ship Sea UnicornWise Jan PettigrewWise Jan Waxes WiserMadcap MehitabelTrue Love and PignutsA Boat in Sight at SuliscannaThe Tide-race of SuliscannaJohn Scarlett Comes AshoreWat\'s Isle of RefugeWat Swims the Water CavernBess Landsborough\'s CatechismThe Surrender of the BelovedAn Ancient Love AffairCaptor and CaptiveSkirting the BreakersPassage PerilousThe Isle of BlissMisfortunate ColinSatan Spies out ParadiseSerpent\'s EggsLove that Thinketh no EvilThe Fiery CrossColl o\' the CowsGreat DundeeKilliekrankieThe Leaguer of DunkeldThe Golden HeartThe Master Comes HomeThe Curate of DalryLochinvar Keeps TrystThe Bride\'s Loving-cupCatch Them Who Can!Within the King\'s MercyEpilogue of SupererogationILLUSTRATIONSWAT\'S HAND MOSTLY ON HIS SWEETHEART\'S SHOULDER\'I WILL TAKE MY OWN LOVE-TOKEN\'SCARLETT THUNDERED ON THE PANELS WITH THE HILT OF HIS SWORDTHE GENTLEMAN INSTANTLY ATTACKED THEM FURIOUSLYTHE MAN CARRIED HER EASILY THROUGH THE SURFA COUPLE OF PISTOL-SHOTS RANG OUT LOUDLYTHE SELF-SATISFACTION FLICKERED OUT OF HIS FACETHEN THE SWIRLING TIDE-RACE TOOK HOLD OF HERA GIGANTIC HIGHLANDER WITH A NAKED CLAYMORE BY HIS SIDEWAT PUSHED OFF IN THE SMALLER BOATSTRIDING FORWARD FRANKLY AND GIVING A HAND TO EACHHE FELL INWARD AMONG THE WOUNDEDWITH HIS LOVE BETWEEN HIS ARMS

Well do I, Hugo Gottfried, remember the night of snow and moonlight when first they brought the Little Playmate home. I had been sleeping—a sturdy, well-grown fellow I, ten years or so as to my age—in a stomacher of blanket and a bed-gown my mother had made me before she died at the beginning of the cold weather. Suddenly something awoke me out of my sleep. So, all in the sharp chill of the night, I got out of my bed, sitting on the edge with my legs dangling, and looked curiously at the bright streams of moonlight which crossed the wooden floor of my garret. I thought if only I could swim straight up one of them, as the motes did in the sunshine, I should be sure to come in time to the place where my mother was—the place where all the pretty white things came from—the sunshine, the moonshine, the starshine, and the snow. And there would be children to play with up there—hundreds of children like myself, and all close at hand. I should not any longer have to sit up aloft in the Red Tower with none to speak to me—all alone on the top of a wall—just because I had a crimson patch sewn on my blue-corded blouse, on my little white shirt, embroidered in red wool on each of my warm winter wristlets, and staring out from the front of both my stockings. It was a pretty enough pattern, too. Yet whenever one of the children I so much longed to play with down on the paved roadway beneath our tower caught sight of it he rose instantly out of the dust and hurled oaths and ill-words at me—aye, and oftentimes other missiles that hurt even worse—at a little lonely boy who was breaking his heart with loving him up there on the tower.

"The Lilac Sunbonnet" from S. R. Crockett. Scottish novelist (1859-1914).

I was only a young fellow when these things began to happen among us, but I remember very well the morning when it first came out about the Bewick carrier. He was postman, too, but had got permission to keep a horse and cart so that he might make a good little bit by fetching parcels and orders from town. Town to us meant East Dene, and Bewick, to which Harry went, lay away to the east among the woods and hills. It was a lonesome place, Bewick, and, indeed, is still, though now they have got a railway coming within eight miles or so. But the mystery of the Moat Wood happened before there was any talk of railways.

Samuel Rutherford Crockett (24 September 1859 – 16 April 1914), who published under the name "S. R. Crockett", was a Scottish novelist He was born at Duchrae, Balmaghie, Kirkcudbrightshire, on 24 September 1859, the illegitimate son of dairymaid Annie Crocket. He was raised on his grandfather\'s Galloway farm, won a bursary to Edinburgh University in 1876, and graduated from there during 1879. After some years of travel, he became in 1886 minister of Penicuik. During that year he produced his first publication, Dulce Cor (Latin: Sweet Heart), a collection of verse under the pseudonym Ford Brereton. He eventually abandoned the Free Church ministry for full-time novel-writing in 1895 The success of J. M. Barrie and the Kailyard school of sentimental, homey writing had already created a demand for stories in Lowland Scots,[3] when Crockett published his successful story of The Stickit Minister in 1893. It was followed by a rapidly produced series of popular novels frequently featuring the history of Scotland or his native Galloway. Crockett made considerable sums of money from his writing and was a friend and correspondent of R. L. Stevenson, but his later work has been criticised as being over-prolific and feebly sentimental. Crockett\'s connection with Kailyard is now beginning to be acknowledged as nebulous at best, as evidenced by a re-appraisal of the whole Kailyard concept by writers such as Andrew Nash.[5] In 1900, Crockett wrote a booklet published by the London camera manufacturer, Newman & Guardia, comparing cameras favourably to pen and pencil and explaining how he encountered the N and G advertisement

Samuel Rutherford Crockett who published under the name "S. R. Crockett", was a Scottish novelist.