Explore "John Burnet of Barns" by John Buchan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The next month was, I think, the busiest in my life. For from the evening of my meeting with Michael Veitch my mind was firmly made up to go to travel abroad, and with this determination came all the countless troubles which a man must meet before he can leave his home. I was busy night and day, now down at Peebles, now riding up Manor and all over the Barns lands, seeing that all things were in right order ere my departure. I got together all the money I desired, and with drafts on the Dutch bankers, which the lawyer folk in Edinburgh got for me, I was in no danger of falling into poverty abroad.
On Tam Todd I laid the management of all things in my absence; and Tam, much impressed by his responsibility, though it was a task which he had really undertaken long before in the later years of my father's life, went about his work with a serious, preoccupied air, as of Atlas with the world on his shoulders. I had much ado in getting ready my baggage for the journey, for I wished to take little, being confident that I could buy all things needful abroad. Jean Morran, on the other hand, would have had me take half the plenishing of the house of Barns, from linen sheets to fresh-kirned butter, for I could not persuade her to think otherwise than that I was going into a desolate land among heathen savages.