In Huntingtower there is a retired Glasgow grocer who, starting out for a walking tour with a knapsack and a poetry book, finds himself, within twenty-four hours, up to the neck in one of the wildest plots of adventure it ever entered the heart of man to conceive. There is a beautiful Russian princess abducted by Bolsheviki and immured in the lonely castle by the sea; there are hidden jewels, a villainous innkeeper, with a gang of ‘tinklers’ keeping watch over the princess until the archvillain arrives in a Danish brig to carry off his helpless victim. How these wicked ones are outmanoeuvred and disposed of by the strategy of Dougal, the captain of a little company of Glasgow street-boys, the ‘Gombal Diehards,’ with the aid of our retired grocer and a romantic poet, picked up on the march — such is the staple of this fascinating tale of humor and adventure. Dougal is a boy of grit and strategy with no English peer, his nearest kin in fiction being Huck Finn; and the spirited old peasant, Mrs. Morran, will live with the best of Barrie.
