 Wolf's Haven), and the few inhabitants gained a precarious subsistence by
manning two or three fishing-boats in the herring season, and smuggling gin and
brandy during the winter months. They paid a kind of hereditary respect to the
Lords of Ravenswood; but, in the difficulties of the family, most of the
inhabitants of Wolf's Hope had contrived to get feu-rights12 to their little
possessions, their huts, kail-yards, and rights of commonty, so that they were
emancipated from the chains of feudal dependence, and free from the various
exactions with which, under every possible pretext, or without any pretext at
all, the Scottish landlords of the period, themselves in great poverty, were
wont to harass their still poorer tenants at will. They might be, on the whole,
termed independent, a circumstance peculiarly galling to Caleb, who had been
wont to exercise over them the same sweeping authority in levying contributions
which was exercised in former times in England, when »the royal purveyors,
sallying forth from under the Gothic portcullis to purchase provisions with
power and prerogative instead of money, brought home the plunder of an hundred
markets, and all that could be seized from a flying and hiding country, and
deposited their spoil in a hundred caverns.«13
    Caleb loved the memory and resented the downfal of that authority, which
mimicked, on a petty scale, the grand contributions exacted by the feudal
sovereigns. And as he fondly flattered himself that the awful rule and right
supremacy which assigned to the Barons of Ravenswood the first and most
effective interest in all productions of nature within five miles of their
castle, only slumbered, and was not departed for ever, he used every now and
then to give the recollection of the inhabitants a little jog by some petty
exaction. These were at first submitted to, with more or less readiness, by the
inhabitants of the hamlet; for they had been so long used to consider the wants
of the Baron and his family as having a title to be preferred to their own, that
their actual independence did not convey to them an immediate sense of freedom.
They resembled a man that has been long fettered, who, even at liberty, feels in
imagination the grasp of the handcuffs still binding his wrists. But the
exercise of freedom is quickly followed with the natural consciousness of its
immunities, as an enlarged prisoner, by the free use of his limbs, soon dispels
the cramped feeling they had acquired when bound.
    The inhabitants of Wolf's Hope began to grumble, to resist, and at length
positively to refuse compliance with the
