Context: Dandie Dinmont, yeoman farmer and fox hunter of the late eighteenth century, is a minor relation of the Laird of Ellangowan whose heir and only son is kidnapped as a child and long presumed dead, though he eventually returns in manhood to claim his estate and the hand of the girl who loved him when he was unknown. Though a secondary character in the novel, Dinmont is one of the simple, rugged, often eccentric Scotsmen whom Scott excelled in creating, and who often steal our interest away from the heroes. To indicate his loyal family feeling that a cousin-housekeeper is welcome to her board until the house of a dead relative can be sold, Scott put into the farmer's mouth a proverb which can be traced back as early as the seventeenth century. Scott uses a variant of the earlier dialectal spelling bluid.

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