Explore "A Journey of Little Profit" by John Buchan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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 with scarce a word of English, and the shentleman-farmer of Inverness and Ross, to lowland graziers and city tradesmen, not to speak of blackguards of many nationalities and more professions.