The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (9.1896)

A Journey of Little Profit

By John Buchan

“The Devil he sang, the Devil he played
High and fast and free.

And this was ever the song he made,

As it was told to me.

‘ Oh, I am the king of the air and the ground,

And lord of the seasons’ roll,

And I will give you a hundred pound,

If you will give me your soul.’ ”

The Ballad of Grey Weather.

The cattle market of Inverforth is, as all men know north of
the Tweed, the greatest market of the kind in the land.
For days in the late Autumn there is the lowing of oxen and the
bleating of sheep among its high wooden pens, and in the rickety
sale-rings the loud clamour of auctioneers and the talk of farmers.
In the open yard where are the drovers and the butchers, a race
always ungodly and law-despising, there is such a Babel of cries
and curses as might wake the Seven Sleepers. From twenty
different adjacent eating-houses comes the clatter of knives, where
the country folk eat their dinner of beef and potatoes, with beer
for sauce, and the collies grovel on the ground for stray morsels.
Hither come a hundred types of men from the Highland cateran
The Yellow Book—Yol. IX. l with