And there he was to stay for a further season with twenty-two starts but now seventeen goals before and still not yet twenty he was tempted South once more, this time to Newcastle, where he would spend three relatively successful years without ever fully being first choice. In a first, foreshortened campaign he would make twenty-one appearances and score five times. In the second, now with Jack Fraser outside him, it was better, thirty-two but only six goals and in the third it was thirty-one and again six before both he and Fraser would find themselves gradually squeezed out, he replaced by Ronnie Orr, Fraser by Dick Roberts. 

McFarlane's response was to return to Scotland again but now to Dundee, where he would spend the next dozen years, play almost three hundred games, joined in 1905 by Fraser once more, score the best part of a hundred goals and from 1904 to 1911 be awarded five caps. And after Tayside it was at thirty-four a last season again down South as reserve coach cum stand-in player at Chelsea until the outbreak of The Great War. By then Alex had been married eight years. The marriage had been in Dundee when he, recorded as a bricklayer, had wed local lass, Marjory McGlashan. They were to have a girl and two boys, the daughter, named Hughina after the elder sister who had brought Alex up, and their elder boy both born on Tayside.