Auld Licht Idyls by J.M. Barrie (page 2)

was a proud day for the Auld Lichts to find their leading elder so conversant with apt Scripture texts. They bowed their heads reverently while he thundered forth that those who lived by the sword would perish by the sword; and when he had finished they took him ben to inspect their bludgeons. I have a vivid recollection of going the round of the Auld Licht and other houses to see the sticks and the wrists in coils of wire.

A stranger in the Tenements in the afternoon would have noted more than one draggled youth in holiday attire, sitting on a doorstep with a wet cloth to his nose; and, passing down the commonty, he would have had to step over prostrate lumps of humanity from which all shape had departed. Gavin Ogilvy limped heavily after his encounter with Thrummy Tosh–a struggle that was looked forward to eagerly as a bi-yearly event; Christy Davie’s development of muscle had not prevented her going down before the terrible onslaught of Joe the miller, and Lang Tammas’ plasters told a tale. It was in the square that the two parties, leading their maimed and blind, formed in force; Tilliedrum thirsting for its opponents’ blood, and Thrums humbly accepting the responsibility of punching the fast-day breakers into the ways of rectitude. In the small, ill-kept square the invaders, to the number of about a hundred, were wedged together at its upper end, while the Thrums people formed in a thick line at the foot. For its inhabitants the way to Tilliedrum lay through this threatening mass of armed weavers. No words were bandied between the two forces; the centre of the square was left open, and nearly every eye was fixed on the town-house clock. It directed operations and gave the signal to charge. The moment six o’clock struck, the upper mass broke its bonds and flung itself on the living barricade. There was a clatter of heads and sticks, a yelling and a groaning, and then the invaders, bursting through the opposing ranks, fled for Tilliedrum. Down the Tanage brae and up the Brae-head they skurried, half a hundred avenging spirits in pursuit. On the Tilliedrum fast-day I have tasted blood myself. In the godless place there is no Auld Licht kirk, but there are two Auld Lichts in it now who walk to Thrums to church every Sabbath, blow or rain as it lists. They are making their influence felt in Tilliedrum.

The Auld Lichts also did valorous deeds at the Battle of Cabbylatch. The farm land so named lies a mile or more to the south of Thrums. You have to go over the rim of the cut to reach it. It is low-lying and uninteresting to the eye, except for some giant stones scattered cold and naked through the fields. No human hands reared these bowlders, but they might be looked upon as tombstones to the heroes who fell (to rise hurriedly) on the plain of Cabbylatch.

The fight of Cabbylatch belongs to the days of what are now but dimly remembered as the Meal Mobs. Then there was a wild cry all over the country for bread (not the fine loaves that we know, but something very much coarser), and hungry men and women, prematurely shrunken, began to forget the taste of meal. Potatoes were their chief sustenance, and, when the crop failed, starvation gripped them. At that time the farmers, having control of the meal, had the small towns at their mercy, and they increased its cost. The price of the meal went up and up, until the famishing people swarmed up the sides of the carts in which it was conveyed to the towns, and, tearing open the sacks, devoured it in handfuls. In Thrums they had a stern sense of justice, and for a time, after taking possession of the meal, they carried it to the square and sold it at what they considered a reasonable price. The money was handed over to the farmers. The honesty of this is worth thinking about, but it seems to have only incensed the farmers the more; and when they saw that to send their meal to the town was not to get high prices for it, they laid their heads together and then gave notice that the people who wanted meal and were able to pay for it must come to the farms. In Thrums no one who cared to live on porridge and bannocks had money to satisfy the farmers; but, on the other hand, none of them grudged going for it, and go they did. They went in numbers from farm to farm, like bands of hungry rats, and throttled the opposition they not infrequently encountered. The raging farmers at last met in council, and, noting that they were lusty men and brave, resolved to march in armed force upon the erring people and burn their town. Now we come to the Battle of Cabbylatch.

The farmers were not less than eighty strong, and chiefly consisted of cavalry. Armed with pitchforks and cumbrous scythes where they were not able to lay their hands on the more orthodox weapons of war, they presented a determined appearance; the few foot-soldiers who had no cart-horses at their disposal bearing in their arms bundles of firewood. One memorable morning they set out to avenge their losses; and by and by a halt was called, when each man bowed his head to listen. In Thrums, pipe and drum were calling the inhabitants to arms. Scouts rushed in with the news that the farmers were advancing rapidly upon the town, and soon the streets were clattering with feet. At that time Thrums had its piper and drummer (the bellman of a later and more degenerate age); and on this occasion they marched together through the narrow wynds, firing the blood of haggard men and summoning them to the square. According to my informant’s father, the gathering of these angry and startled weavers, when he thrust his blue bonnet on his head and rushed out to join them, was an impressive and solemn spectacle. That bloodshed was meant there can be no doubt; for starving men do not see the ludicrous side of things. The difference between the farmers and the town had resolved itself into an ugly and sullen hate, and the wealthier townsmen who would have come between the people and the bread were fiercely pushed aside. There was no nominal leader, but every man in the ranks meant to fight for himself and his belongings; and they are said to have sallied out to meet the foe in no disorder. The women they would fain have left behind them; but these had their own injuries to redress, and they followed in their husbands’ wake carrying bags of stones. The men, who were of various denominations, were armed with sticks, blunderbusses, anything they could snatch up at a moment’s notice; and some of them were not unacquainted with fighting. Dire silence prevailed among the men, but the women shouted as they ran, and the curious army moved forward to the drone and squall of drum and pipe. The enemy was sighted on the level land of Cabbylatch, and here, while the intending combatants glared at each other, a well-known local magnate galloped his horse between them and ordered them in the name of the king to return to their homes. But for the farmers that meant further depredation at the people’s hands, and the townsmen would not go back to their gloomy homes to sit down and wait for sunshine. Soon stones (the first, it is said, cast by a woman) darkened the air. The farmers got the word to charge, but their horses, with the best intentions, did not know the way. There was a stampeding in different directions, a blind rushing of one frightened steed against another; and then the townspeople, breaking any ranks they had hitherto managed to keep, rushed vindictively forward. The struggle at Cabbylatch itself was not of long duration; for their own horses proved the farmers’ worst enemies, except in the cases where these sagacious animals took matters into their own ordering and bolted judiciously for their stables. The day was to Thrums.

Individual deeds of prowess were done that day. Of these not the least fondly remembered by her descendants were those of the gallant matron who pursued the most obnoxious farmer in the district even to his very porch with heavy stones and opprobrious epithets. Once when he thought he had left her far behind did he alight to draw breath and take a pinch of snuff, and she was upon him like a flail. With a terror stricken cry he leaped once more upon his horse and fled, but not without leaving his snuff-box in the hands of the derisive enemy. Meggy has long gone to the kirk-yard, but the snuff-mull is still preserved.

Some ugly cuts were given and received, and heads as well as ribs were broken; but the townsmen’s triumph was short-lived. The ringleaders were whipped through the streets of Perth, as a warning to persons thinking of taking the law into their own hands; and all the lasting consolation they got was that, some time afterward, the chief witness against them, the parish minister, met with a mysterious death. They said it was evidently the hand of God; but some people looked suspiciously at them when they said it.

CHAPTER VI.

THE OLD DOMINIE.

From the new cemetery, which is the highest point in Thrums, you just fail to catch sight of the red school-house that nestles between two bare trees, some five miles up the glen of Quharity. This was proved by Davit Lunan, tinsmith, whom I have heard tell the story. It was in the time when the cemetery gates were locked to keep the bodies of suicides out, but men who cared to risk the consequences could get the coffin over the high dyke and bury it themselves. Peter Lundy’s coffin broke, as one might say, into the church-yard in this way, Peter having hanged himself in the Whunny wood when he saw that work he must. The general feeling among the intimates of the deceased was expressed by Davit when he said:

“It may do the crittur nae guid i’ the tail o’ the day, but he paid for’s bit o’ ground, an’ he’s in’s richt to occupy it.”

The custom was to push the coffin on to the wall up a plank, and then let it drop less carefully into the cemetery. Some of the mourners were dragging the plank over the wall, with Davit Lunan on the top directing them, when they seem to have let go and sent the tinsmith suddenly into the air. A week afterward it struck Davit, when in the act of soldering a hole in Leeby Wheens’ flagon (here he branched off to explain that he had made the flagon years before, and that Leeby was sister to Tammas Wheens, and married one Baker Robbie, who died of chicken-pox in his forty-fourth year), that when “up there” he had a view of Quharity school-house. Davit was as truthful as a man who tells the same story more than once can be expected to be, and it is far from a suspicious circumstance that he did not remember seeing the school-house all at once. In Thrums things only struck them gradually. The new cemetery, for instance, was only so called because it had been new once.

In this red stone school, full of the modern improvements that he detested, the old dominie whom I succeeded taught, and sometimes slept, during the last five years of his cantankerous life. It was in a little thatched school, consisting of but one room, that he did his best work, some five hundred yards away from the edifice that was reared in its stead. Now dismally fallen into disrepute, often indeed a domicile for cattle, the ragged academy of Glen Quharity, where he held despotic sway for nearly half a century, is falling to pieces slowly in a howe that conceals it from the high-road. Even in its best scholastic days, when it sent barefooted lads to college who helped to hasten the Disruption, it was but a pile of ungainly stones, such as Scott’s Black Dwarf flung together in a night, with holes in its broken roof of thatch where the rain trickled through, and never with less than two of its knotted little window-panes stopped with brown paper. The twelve or twenty pupils of both sexes who constituted the attendance sat at the two loose desks, which never fell unless you leaned on them, with an eye on the corner of the earthen floor where the worms came out, and on cold days they liked the wind to turn the peat smoke into the room. One boy, who was supposed to wash it out, got his education free for keeping the school-house dirty, and the others paid their way with peats, which they brought in their hands, just as wealthier school-children carry books, and with pence which the dominie collected regularly every Monday morning. The attendance on Monday mornings was often small.

Once a year the dominie added to his income by holding cockfights in the old school. This was at Yule, and the same practice held in the parish school of Thrums. It must have been a strange sight. Every male scholar was expected to bring a cock to the school, and to pay a shilling to the dominie for the privilege of seeing it killed there. The dominie was the master of the sports, assisted by the neighboring farmers, some of whom might be elders of the church. Three rounds were fought. By the end of the first round all the cocks had fought, and the victors were then pitted against each other. The cocks that survived the second round were eligible for the third, and the dominie, besides his shilling, got every cock killed. Sometimes, if all stories be true, the spectators were fighting with each other before the third round concluded.

The glen was but sparsely dotted with houses even in those days; a number of them inhabited by farmer-weavers, who combined two trades and just managed to live. One would have a plough, another a horse, and so in Glen Quharity they helped each other. Without a loom in addition many of them would have starved, and on Saturdays the big farmer and his wife, driving home in a gig, would pass the little farmer carrying or wheeling his wob to Thrums. When there was no longer a market for the produce of the hand-loom these farms had to be given up, and thus it is that the old school is not the only house in our weary glen around which gooseberry and currant bushes, once tended by careful hands, now grow wild.

In heavy spates the children were conveyed to the old school, as they are still to the new one, in carts, and between it and the dominie’s whitewashed, dwelling-house swirled in winter a torrent of water that often carried lumps of the land along with it. This burn he had at times to ford on stilts.

Before the Education Act passed the dominie was not much troubled by the school inspector, who appeared in great splendor every year at Thrums. Fifteen years ago, however, Glen Quharity resolved itself into a School Board, and marched down the glen, with the minister at its head, to condemn the school. When the dominie, who had heard of their design, saw the board approaching, he sent one of his scholars, who enjoyed making a mess of himself, wading across the burn to bring over the stilts which were lying on the other side. The board were thus unable to send across a spokesman, and after they had harangued the dominie, who was in the best of tempers, from the wrong side of the stream, the siege was raised by their returning home, this time with the minister in the rear. So far as is known, this was the only occasion on which the dominie ever lifted his hat to the minister. He was the Established Church minister at the top of the glen, but the dominie was an Auld Licht, and trudged into Thrums to church nearly every Sunday with his daughter.

The farm of Little Tilly lay so close to the dominie’s house that from one window he could see through a telescope whether the farmer was going to church, owing to Little Tilly’s habit of never shaving except with that intention, and of always doing it at a looking-glass which he hung on a nail in his door. The farmer was Established Church, and when the dominie saw him in his shirt-sleeves with a razor in his hand, he called for his black clothes. If he did not see him it is undeniable that the dominie sent his daughter to Thrums, but remained at home himself. Possibly, therefore, the dominie sometimes went to church, because he did not want to give Little Tilly and the Established minister the satisfaction of knowing that he was not devout today, and it is even conceivable that had Little Tilly had a telescope and an intellect as well as his neighbor, he would have spied on the dominie in return. He sent the teacher a load of potatoes every year, and the recipient rated him soundly if they did not turn out as well as the ones he had got the autumn before. Little Tilly was rather in awe of the dominie, and had an idea that he was a Freethinker, because he played the fiddle and wore a black cap.

The dominie was a wizened-looking little man, with sharp eyes that pierced you when they thought they were unobserved, and if any visitor drew near who might be a member of the board, he disappeared into his house much as a startled weasel makes for its hole. The most striking thing about him was his walk, which to the casual observer seemed a limp. The glen in our part is marshy, and to progress along it you have to jump from one little island of grass or heather to another. Perhaps it was this that made the dominie take the main road and even the streets of Thrums in leaps, as if there were bowlders or puddles in the way. It is, however, currently believed among those who knew him best that he jerked himself along in that way when he applied for the vacancy in Glen Quharity school, and that he was therefore chosen from among the candidates by the committee of farmers, who saw that he was specially constructed for the district.

In the spring the inspector was sent to report on the school, and, of course, he said, with a wave of his hand, that this would never do. So a new school was built, and the ramshackle little academy that had done good service in its day was closed for the last time. For years it had been without a lock; ever since a blatter of wind and rain drove the door against the fire-place. After that it was the dominie’s custom, on seeing the room cleared, to send in a smart boy–a dux was always chosen–who wedged a clod of earth or peat between doorpost and door. Thus the school was locked up for the night. The boy came out by the window, where he entered to open the door next morning. In time grass hid the little path from view that led to the old school, and a dozen years ago every particle of wood about the building, including the door and the framework of the windows, had been burned by travelling tinkers.

The board would have liked to leave the dominie in his whitewashed dwelling-house to enjoy his old age comfortably, and until he learned that he had intended to retire. Then he changed his tactics and removed his beard. Instead of railing at the new school, he began to approve of it, and it soon came to the ears of the horrified Established minister, who had a man (Established) in his eye for the appointment, that the dominie was looking ten years younger. As he spurned a pension he had to get the place, and then began a warfare of bickerings between the board and him that lasted until within a few weeks of his death. In his scholastic barn the dominie had thumped the Latin grammar into his scholars till they became university bursars to escape him. In the new school, with maps (which he hid in the hen-house) and every other modern appliance for making teaching easy, he was the scandal of the glen. He snapped at the clerk of the board’s throat, and barred his door in the minister’s face. It was one of his favorite relaxations to peregrinate the district, telling the farmers who were not on the board themselves, but were given to gossiping with those who were, that though he could slumber pleasantly in the school so long as the hum of the standards was kept up, he immediately woke if it ceased.

Having settled himself in his new quarters, the dominie seems to have read over the code and come at once to the conclusion that it would be idle to think of straightforwardly fulfilling its requirements. The inspector he regarded as a natural enemy, who was to be circumvented by much guile. One year that admirable Oxford don arrived at the school, to find that all the children, except two girls–one of whom had her face tied up with red flannel–were away for the harvest. On another occasion the dominie met the inspector’s trap some distance from the school, and explained that he would guide him by a short cut, leaving the driver to take the dog-cart to a farm where it could be put up. The unsuspecting inspector agreed, and they set off, the obsequious dominie carrying his bag. He led his victim into another glen, the hills round which had hidden their heads in mist, and then slyly remarked that he was afraid they had lost their way. The minister, who liked to attend the examination, reproved the dominie for providing no luncheon, but turned pale when his enemy suggested that he should examine the boys in Latin.

For some reason that I could never discover, the dominie had all his life refused to teach his scholars geography. The inspector and many others asked him why there was no geography class, and his invariable answer was to point to his pupils collectively, and reply in an impressive whisper:

“They winna hae her.”

This story, too, seems to reflect against the dominie’s views on cleanliness. One examination day the minister attended to open the inspection with prayer. Just as he was finishing, a scholar entered who had a reputation for dirt.

“Michty!” cried a little pupil, as his opening eyes fell on the apparition at the door, “there’s Jocky Tamson wi’ his face washed!”

When the dominie was a younger man he had first clashed with the minister during Mr. Rattray’s attempts to do away with some old customs that were already dying by inches. One was the selection of a queen of beauty from among the young women at the annual Thrums fair. The judges, who were selected from the better-known farmers as a rule, sat at the door of a tent that reeked of whiskey, and regarded the competitors filing by much as they selected prize sheep, with a stolid stare. There was much giggling and blushing on these occasions among the maidens, and shouts from their relatives and friends to “Haud yer head up, Jean,” and “Lat them see yer een, Jess.” The dominie enjoyed this, and was one time chosen, a judge, when he insisted on the prize’s being bestowed on his own daughter, Marget. The other judges demurred, but the dominie remained firm and won the day.

“She wasna the best-faured amon them,” he admitted afterward, “but a man maun mak the maist o’ his ain.”

The dominie, too, would not shake his head with Mr. Rattray over the apple and loaf bread raffles in the smithy, nor even at the Daft Days, the black week of glum debauch that ushered in the year, a period when the whole countryside rumbled to the farmers’ “kebec” laden cart.

For the great part of his career the dominie had not made forty pounds a year, but he “died worth” about three hundred pounds. The moral of his life came in just as he was leaving it, for he rose from his death-bed to hide a whiskey-bottle from his wife.

CHAPTER VII.

CREE QUEERY AND MYSY DROLLY.

The children used to fling stones at Grinder Queery because he loved his mother. I never heard the Grinder’s real name. He and his mother were Queery and Drolly, contemptuously so called, and they answered to these names. I remember Cree best as a battered old weaver, who bent forward as he walked, with his arms hanging limp as if ready to grasp the shafts of the barrow behind which it was his life to totter up hill and down hill, a rope of yarn suspended round his shaking neck and fastened to the shafts, assisting him to bear the yoke and slowly strangling him. By and by there came a time when the barrow and the weaver seemed both palsy-stricken, and Cree, gasping for breath, would stop in the middle of a brae, unable to push his load over a stone. Then he laid himself down behind it to prevent the barrow’s slipping back. On those occasions only the barefooted boys who jeered at the panting weaver could put new strength into his shrivelled arms. They did it by telling him that he and Mysy would have to go to the “poorshouse” after all, at which the gray old man would wince, as if “joukin” from a blow, and, shuddering, rise and, with a desperate effort, gain the top of the incline. Small blame perhaps attached to Cree if, as he neared his grave, he grew a little dottle. His loads of yarn frequently took him past the workhouse, and his eyelids quivered as he drew near. Boys used to gather round the gate in anticipation of his coming, and make a feint of driving him inside. Cree, when he observed them, sat down on his barrow-shafts terrified to approach, and I see them now pointing to the workhouse till he left his barrow on the road and hobbled away, his legs cracking as he ran.

It is strange to know that there was once a time when Cree was young and straight, a callant who wore a flower in his button-hole and tried to be a hero for a maiden’s sake.

Before Cree settled down as a weaver, he was knife and scissor grinder for three counties, and Mysy, his mother, accompanied him wherever he went. Mysy trudged alongside him till her eyes grew dim and her limbs failed her, and then Cree was told that she must be sent to the pauper’s home. After that a pitiable and beautiful sight was to be seen. Grinder Queery, already a feeble man, would wheel his grindstone along the long high-road, leaving Mysy behind. He took the stone on a few hundred yards, and then, hiding it by the roadside in a ditch or behind a paling, returned for his mother. Her he led–sometimes he almost carried her–to the place where the grindstone lay, and thus by double journeys kept her with him. Every one said that Mysy’s death would be a merciful release–every one but Cree.

Cree had been a grinder from his youth, having learned the trade from his father, but he gave it up when Mysy became almost blind. For a time he had to leave her in Thrums with Dan’l Wilkie’s wife, and find employment himself in Tilliedrum. Mysy got me to write several letters for her to Cree, and she cried while telling me what to say. I never heard either of them use a term of endearment to the other, but all Mysy could tell me to put in writing was: “Oh, my son Cree; oh, my beloved son; oh, I have no one but you; oh, thou God watch over my Cree!” On one of these occasions Mysy put into my hands a paper, which she said would perhaps help me to write the letter. It had been drawn up by Cree many years before, when he and his mother had been compelled to part for a time, and I saw from it that he had been trying to teach Mysy to write. The paper consisted of phrases such as “Dear son Cree,” “Loving mother,” “I am takin’ my food weel,” “Yesterday,” “Blankets,” “The peats is near done,” “Mr. Dishart,” “Come home, Cree.” The grinder had left this paper with his mother, and she had written letters to him from it.

When Dan’l Wilkie objected to keeping a cranky old body like Mysy in his house, Cree came back to Thrums and took a single room with a hand-loom in it. The flooring was only lumpy earth, with sacks spread over it to protect Mysy’s feet. The room contained two dilapidated old coffin-beds, a dresser, a high-backed arm-chair, several three-legged stools, and two tables, of which one could be packed away beneath the other. In one corner stood the wheel at which Cree had to fill his own pirns. There was a plate-rack on one wall, and near the chimney-piece hung the wag-at-the-wall clock, the time-piece that was commonest in Thrums at that time, and that got this name because its exposed pendulum swung along the wall. The two windows in the room faced each other on opposite walls, and were so small that even a child might have stuck in trying to crawl through them. They opened on hinges, like a door. In the wall of the dark passage leading from the outer door into the room was a recess where a pan and pitcher of water always stood wedded, as it were, and a little hole, known as the “bole,” in the wall opposite the fire-place contained Cree’s library. It consisted of Baxter’s “Saints’ Rest,” Harvey’s “Meditations,” the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a work on folk-lore, and several Bibles. The saut-backet, or salt-bucket, stood at the end of the fender, which was half of an old cart-wheel. Here Cree worked, whistling “Ower the watter for Chairlie” to make Mysy think that he was as gay as a mavis. Mysy grew querulous in her old age, and up to the end she thought of poor, done Cree as a handsome gallant. Only by weaving far on into the night could Cree earn as much as six shillings a week. He began at six o’clock in the morning, and worked until midnight by the light of his cruizey. The cruizey was all the lamp Thrums had in those days, though it is only to be seen in use now in a few old-world houses in the glens. It is an ungainly thing in iron, the size of a man’s palm, and shaped not unlike the palm when contracted and deepened to hold a liquid. Whale-oil, lying open in the mould, was used, and the wick was a rash with the green skin peeled off. These rashes were sold by herd-boys at a halfpenny the bundle, but Cree gathered his own wicks. The rashes skin readily when you know how to do it. The iron mould was placed inside another of the same shape, but slightly larger, for in time the oil dripped through the iron, and the whole was then hung by a cleek or hook close to the person using it. Even with three wicks it gave but a stime of light, and never allowed the weaver to see more than the half of his loom at a time. Sometimes Cree used threads for wicks. He was too dull a man to have many visitors, but Mr. Dishart called occasionally and reproved him for telling his mother lies. The lies Cree told Mysy were that he was sharing the meals he won for her, and that he wore the overcoat which he had exchanged years before for a blanket to keep her warm.

There was a terrible want of spirit about Grinder Queery. Boys used to climb on to his stone roof with clods of damp earth in their hands, which they dropped down the chimney. Mysy was bedridden by this time, and the smoke threatened to choke her; so Cree, instead of chasing his persecutors, bargained with them. He gave them fly-hooks which he had busked himself, and when he had nothing left to give he tried to flatter them into dealing gently with Mysy by talking to them as men. One night it went through the town that Mysy now lay in bed all day listening for her summons to depart. According to her ideas this would come in the form of a tapping at the window, and their intention was to forestall the spirit. Dite Gow’s boy, who is now a grown man, was hoisted up to one of the little windows, and he has always thought of Mysy since as he saw her then for the last time. She lay sleeping, so far as he could see, and Cree sat by the fireside looking at her.

Every one knew that there was seldom a fire in that house unless Mysy was cold. Cree seemed to think that the fire was getting low. In the little closet, which, with the kitchen, made up his house, was a corner shut off from the rest of the room by a few boards, and behind this he kept his peats. There was a similar receptacle for potatoes in the kitchen. Cree wanted to get another peat for the fire without disturbing Mysy. First he took off his boots, and made for the peats on tip-toe. His shadow was cast on the bed, however, so he next got down on his knees and crawled softly into the closet. With the peat in his hands he returned in the same way, glancing every moment at the bed where Mysy lay. Though Tammy Gow’s face was pressed against a broken window, he did not hear Cree putting that peat on the fire. Some say that Mysy heard, but pretended not to do so for her son’s sake; that she realized the deception he played on her and had not the heart to undeceive him. But it would be too sad to believe that. The boys left Cree alone that night.

The old weaver lived on alone in that solitary house after Mysy left him, and by and by the story went abroad that he was saving money. At first no one believed this except the man who told it, but there seemed after all to be something in it. You had only to hit Cree’s trouser pocket to hear the money chinking, for he was afraid to let it out of his clutch. Those who sat on dykes with him when his day’s labor was over said that the wearer kept his hand all the time in his pocket, and that they saw his lips move as he counted his hoard by letting it slip through his fingers. So there were boys who called “Miser Queery” after him instead of Grinder, and asked him whether he was saving up to keep himself from the workhouse.

But we had all done Cree wrong. It came out on his death-bed what he had been storing up his money for. Grinder, according to the doctor, died of getting a good meal from a friend of his earlier days after being accustomed to starve on potatoes and a very little oatmeal indeed. The day before he died this friend sent him half a sovereign, and when Grinder saw it he sat up excitedly in his bed and pulled his corduroys from beneath his pillow. The woman who, out of kindness, attended him in his last illness, looked on curiously while Cree added the sixpences and coppers in his pocket to the half-sovereign. After all they only made some two pounds, but a look of peace came into Cree’s eyes as he told the woman to take it all to a shop in the town. Nearly twelve years previously Jamie Lownie had lent him two pounds, and though the money was never asked for, it preyed on Cree’s mind that he was in debt. He paid off all he owed, and so Cree’s life was not, I think, a failure.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE COURTING OF T’NOWHEAD’S BELL.

For two years it had been notorious in the square that Sam’l Dickie was thinking of courting T’nowhead’s Bell, and that if little Sanders Elshioner (which is the Thrums pronunciation of Alexander Alexander) went in for her, he might prove a formidable rival. Sam’l was a weaver in the Tenements, and Sanders a coal-carter, whose trade-mark was a bell on his horse’s neck that told when coal was coming. Being something of a public man, Sanders had not, perhaps, so high a social position as Sam’l, but he had succeeded his father on the coal-cart, while the weaver had already tried several trades. It had always been against Sam’l, too, that once when the kirk was vacant he had advised the selection of the third minister who preached for it on the ground that it came expensive to pay a large number of candidates. The scandal of the thing was hushed up, out of respect for his father, who was a God-fearing man, but Sam’l was known by it in Lang Tammas’ circle. The coal-carter was called Little Sanders to distinguish him from his father, who was not much more than half his size. He had grown up with the name, and its inapplicability now came home to nobody. Sam’l’s mother had been more far-seeing than Sanders’. Her man had been called Sammy all his life because it was the name he got as a boy, so when their eldest son was born she spoke of him as Sam’l while still in the cradle. The neighbors imitated her, and thus the young man had a better start in life than had been granted to Sammy, his father.

It was Saturday evening–the night in the week when Auld Licht young men fell in love. Sam’l Dickie, wearing a blue glengarry bonnet with a red ball on the top, came to the door of a one-story house in the Tenements, and stood there wriggling, for he was in a suit of tweed for the first time that week, and did not feel at one with them. When his feeling of being a stranger to himself wore off, he looked up and down the road, which straggles between houses and gardens, and then, picking his way over the puddles, crossed to his father’s hen-house and sat down on it. He was now on his way to the square.

Eppie Fargus was sitting on an adjoining dyke knitting stockings, and Sam’l looked at her for a time.

“Is’t yersel, Eppie?” he said at last.

“It’s a’ that,” said Eppie.

“Hoo’s a’ wi’ ye?” asked Sam’l.

“We’re juist aff an’ on,” replied Eppie, cautiously.

There was not much more to say, but as Sam’l sidled off the hen-house, he murmured politely, “Ay, ay.” In another minute he would have been fairly started, but Eppie resumed the conversation.

“Sam’l,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye, “ye can tell Lisbeth Fargus I’ll likely be drappin’ in on her’ aboot Mununday or Teisday.”

Lisbeth was sister to Eppie, and wife of Tammas McQuhatty, better known as T’nowhead, which was the name of his farm. She was thus Bell’s mistress.

Sam’l leaned against the hen-house as if all his desire to depart had gone.

“Hoo d’ye kin I’ll be at the T’nowhead the nicht?” he asked, grinning in anticipation.

“Ou, I’se warrant ye’ll be after Bell,” said Eppie.

“Am no sae sure o’ that,” said Sam’l, trying to leer. He was enjoying himself now.

“Am no sure o’ that,” he repeated, for Eppie seemed lost in stitches.

“Sam’l!”

“Ay.”

“Ye’ll be speirin’ her sune noo, I dinna doot?”

This took Sam’l, who had only been courting Bell for a year or two, a little aback.

“Hoo d’ye mean, Eppie?” he asked.

“Maybe ye’ll do’t the nicht.”

“Na, there’s nae hurry,” said Sam’l.

“Weel, we’re a’ coontin’ on’t, Sam’l.”

“Gae wa wi’ ye.”

“What for no?”

“Gae wa wi’ ye,” said Sam’l again,

“Bell’s gei an’ fond o’ ye, Sam’l.”

“Ay,” said Sam’l.

“But am dootin’ ye’re a fell billy wi’ the lasses.”

“Ay, oh, I d’na kin, moderate, moderate,” said Sam’l, in high delight.

“I saw ye,” said Eppie, speaking with a wire in her mouth, “gae’in on terr’ble wi’ Mysy Haggart at the pump last Saturday.”

“We was juist amoosin’ oorsels,” said Sam’l,

“It’ll be nae amoosement to Mysy,” said Eppie, “gin ye brak her heart.”

“Losh, Eppie,” said Sam’l, “I didna think o’ that.”

“Ye maun kin weel, Sam’l, ‘at there’s mony a lass wid jump at ye.”

“Ou, weel,” said Sam’l, implying that a man must take these things as they come.

“For ye’re a dainty chield to look at, Sam’l.”

“Do ye think so, Eppie? Ay, ay; oh, I d’na kin am onything by the ordinar.”

“Ye mayna be,” said Eppie, “but lasses doesna do to be ower partikler.”

Sam’l resented this, and prepared to depart again.

“Ye’ll no tell Bell that?” he asked, anxiously.

“Tell her what?”

“Aboot me an’ Mysy.”

“We’ll see hoo ye behave yersel, Sam’l.”

“No ‘at I care, Eppie; ye can tell her gin ye like. I widna think twice o’ tellin’ her mysel.”

“The Lord forgie ye for leein’, Sam’l,” said Eppie, as he disappeared down Tammy Tosh’s close. Here he came upon Henders Webster.

“Ye’re late, Sam’l,” said Henders.

“What for?”

“Ou, I was thinkin’ ye wid be gaen the length o’ T’nowhead the nicht, an’ I saw Sanders Elshioner makkin’s wy there an oor syne.”

“Did ye?” cried Sam’l, adding craftily, “but it’s naething to me.”

“Tod, lad,” said Henders, “gin ye dinna buckle to, Sanders’ll be carryin’ her off.”

Sam’l flung back his head and passed on.

“Sam’l!” cried Henders after him.

“Ay,” said Sam’l, wheeling round.

“Gie Bell a kiss frae me.”

The full force of this joke struck neither all at once. Sam’l began to smile at it as he turned down the school-wynd, and it came upon Henders while he was in his garden feeding his ferret. Then he slapped his legs gleefully, and explained the conceit to Will’um Byars, who went into the house and thought it over.

There were twelve or twenty little groups of men in the square, which was lit by a flare of oil suspended over a cadger’s cart. Now and again a staid young woman passed through the square with a basket on her arm, and if she had lingered long enough to give them time, some of the idlers would have addressed her. As it was, they gazed after her, and then grinned to each other.

“Ay, Sam’l,” said two or three young men, as Sam’l joined them beneath the town-clock. “Ay, Davit,” replied Sam’l.

This group was composed of some of the sharpest wits in Thrums, and it was not to be expected that they would let this opportunity pass. Perhaps when Sam’l joined them he knew what was in store for him.

“Was ye lookin’ for T’nowhead’s Bell, Sam’l?” asked one.

“Or mebbe ye was wantin’ the minister?” suggested another, the same who had walked out twice with Chirsty Duff and not married her after all.

Sam’l could not think of a good reply at the moment, so he laughed good-naturedly.

“Ondootedly she’s a snod bit crittur,” said Davit, archly.

“An’ michty clever wi’ her fingers,” added Jamie Deuchars.

“Man, I’ve thocht o’ makkin’ up to Bell mysel,” said Pete Ogle. “Wid there be ony chance, think ye, Sam’l?”

“I’m thinkin’ she widna hae ye for her first, Pete,” replied Sam’l, in one of those happy flashes that come to some men, “but there’s nae sayin’ but what she micht tak ye to finish up wi’.”

The unexpectedness of this sally startled every one. Though Sam’l did not set up for a wit, however, like Davit, it was notorious that he could say a cutting thing once in a way.

“Did ye ever see Bell reddin’ up?” asked Pete, recovering from his overthrow. He was a man who bore no malice.

“It’s a sicht,” said Sam’l, solemnly.

“Hoo will that be?” asked Jamie Deuchars.

“It’s weel worth yer while,” said Pete, “to ging atower to the T’nowhead an’ see. Ye’ll mind the closed-in beds i’ the kitchen? Ay, weel, they’re a fell spoilt crew, T’nowhead’s litlins, an’ no that aisy to manage. Th’ ither lasses Lisbeth’s hae’n had a michty trouble wi’ them. When they war i’ the middle o’ their reddin’ up the bairns wid come tumlin’ about the floor, but, sal, I assure ye, Bell didna fash lang wi’ them. Did she, Sam’l?”

“She did not,” said Sam’l, dropping into a fine mode of speech to add emphasis to his remark.

“I’ll tell ye what she did,” said Pete to the others. “She juist lifted up the litlins, twa at a time, an’ flung them into the coffin-beds. Syne she snibbit the doors on them, an’ keepit them there till the floor was dry.”

“Ay, man, did she so?” said Davit, admiringly.

“I’ve seen her do’t mysel,” said Sam’l.

“There’s no a lassie maks better bannocks this side o’ Fetter Lums,” continued Pete.

“Her mither tocht her that,” said Sam’l; “she was a gran’ han’ at the bakin’, Kitty Ogilvy.”

“I’ve heard say,” remarked Jamie, putting it this way so as not to tie himself down to anything, “‘at Bell’s scones is equal to Mag Lunan’s.”

“So they are,” said Sam’l, almost fiercely.

“I kin she’s a neat han’ at singein’ a hen,” said Pete.

“An’ wi’t a’,” said Davit, “she’s a snod, canty bit stocky in her Sabbath claes.”

“If onything, thick in the waist,” suggested Jamie.

“I dinna see that,” said Sam’l.

“I d’na care for her hair either,” continued Jamie, who was very nice in his tastes; “something mair yalloweby wid be an improvement.”

“A’body kins,” growled Sam’l, “‘at black hair’s the bonniest.” The others chuckled. “Puir Sam’l!” Pete said.

Sam’l not being certain whether this should be received with a smile or a frown, opened his mouth wide as a kind of compromise. This was position one with him for thinking things, over.

Few Auld Lichts, as I have said, went the length of choosing a helpmate for themselves. One day a young man’s friends would see him mending the washing-tub of a maiden’s mother. They kept the joke until Saturday night, and then he learned from them what he had been after. It dazed him for a time, but in a year or so he grew accustomed to the idea, and they were then married. With a little help he fell in love just like other people.

Sam’l was going the way of the others, but he found it difficult to come to the point. He only went courting once a week, and he could never take up the running at the place where he left off the Saturday before. Thus he had not, so far, made great headway. His method of making up to Bell had been to drop in at T’nowhead on Saturday nights and talk with the farmer about the rinderpest.

The farm kitchen was Bell’s testimonial. Its chairs, tables, and stools were scoured by her to the whiteness of Rob Angus’ saw-mill boards, and the muslin blind on the window was starched like a child’s pinafore. Bell was brave, too, as well as energetic. Once Thrums had been overrun with thieves. It is now thought that there may have been only one, but he had the wicked cleverness of a gang. Such was his repute that there were weavers who spoke of locking their doors when they went from home. He was not very skilful, however, being generally caught, and when they said they knew he was a robber, he gave them their things back and went away. If they had given him time there is no doubt that he would have gone off with his plunder. One night he went to T’nowhead, and Bell, who slept In the kitchen, was awakened by the noise. She knew who it would be, so she rose and dressed herself, and went to look for him with a candle. The thief had not known what to do when he got in, and as it was very lonely he was glad to see Bell. She told him he ought to be ashamed of himself, and would not let him out by the door until he had taken off his boots so as not to soil the carpet.

On this Saturday evening Sam’l stood his ground in the square, until by and by he found himself alone. There were other groups there still, but his circle had melted away. They went separately, and no one said good-night. Each took himself off slowly, backing out of the group until he was fairly started.

Sam’l looked about him, and then, seeing that the others had gone, walked round the town-house into the darkness of the brae that leads down and then up to the farm of T’nowhead.

To get into the good graces of Lisbeth Fargus you had to know her ways and humor them. Sam’l, who was a student of women, knew this, and so, instead of pushing the door open and walking in, he went through the rather ridiculous ceremony of knocking. Sanders Elshioner was also aware of this weakness of Lisbeth’s, but though he often made up his mind to knock, the absurdity of the thing prevented his doing so when he reached the door. T’nowhead himself had never got used to his wife’s refined notions, and when any one knocked he always started to his feet, thinking there must be something wrong.

Lisbeth came to the door, her expansive figure blocking the way in.

“Sam’l,” she said.

“Lisbeth,” said Sam’l.

He shook hands with the farmer’s wife, knowing that she liked it, but only said, “Ay, Bell,” to his sweetheart, “Ay, T’nowhead,” to McQuhatty, and “It’s yersel, Sanders,” to his rival.

They were all sitting round the fire; T’nowhead, with his feet on the ribs, wondering why he felt so warm, and Bell darned a stocking, while Lisbeth kept an eye on a goblet full of potatoes.

“Sit into the fire, Sam’l,” said the farmer, not, however, making way for him.

“Na, na,” said Sam’l; “I’m to bide nae time.” Then he sat into the fire. His face was turned away from Bell, and when she spoke he answered her without looking round. Sam’l felt a little anxious. Sanders Elshioner, who had one leg shorter than the other, but looked well when sitting, seemed suspiciously at home. He asked Bell questions out of his own head, which was beyond Sam’l, and once he said something to her in such a low voice that the others could not catch it. T’nowhead asked curiously what it was, and Sanders explained that he had only said, “Ay, Bell, the morn’s the Sabbath.” There was nothing startling in this, but Sam’l did not like it. He began to wonder if he were too late, and had he seen his opportunity would have told Bell of a nasty rumor that Sanders intended to go over to the Free Church if they would make him kirk-officer.

Sam’l had the good-will of T’nowhead’s wife, who liked a polite man. Sanders did his best, but from want of practice he constantly made mistakes. To-night, for instance, he wore his hat in the house because he did not like to put up his hand and take it off. T’nowhead had not taken his off either, but that was because he meant to go out by and by and lock the byre door. It was impossible to say which of her lovers Bell preferred. The proper course with an Auld Licht lassie was to prefer the man who proposed to her.

“Ye’ll bide a wee, an’ hae something to eat?” Lisbeth asked Sam’l, with her eyes on the goblet.

“No, I thank ye,” said Sam’l, with true gentility.

“Ye’ll better.”

“I dinna think it.”

“Hoots aye; what’s to hender ye?”

“Weel, since ye’re sae pressin’, I’ll bide.”

No one asked Sanders to stay. Bell could not, for she was but the servant, and T’nowhead knew that the kick his wife had given him meant that he was not to do so either. Sanders whistled to show that he was not uncomfortable.

“Ay, then, I’ll be stappin’ ower the brae,” he said at last.

He did not go, however. There was sufficient pride in him to get him off his chair, but only slowly, for he had to get accustomed to the notion of going. At intervals of two or three minutes he remarked that he must now be going. In the same circumstances Sam’l would have acted similarly. For a Thrums man, it is one of the hardest things in life to get away from anywhere.

At last Lisbeth saw that something must be done. The potatoes were burning, and T’nowhead had an invitation on his tongue.

“Yes, I’ll hae to be movin’,” said Sanders, hopelessly, for the fifth time.

“Guid nicht to ye, then, Sanders,” said Lisbeth. “Gie the door a fling-to, ahent ye.”

Sanders, with a mighty effort, pulled himself together. He looked boldly at Bell, and then took off his hat carefully. Sam’l saw with misgivings that there was something in it which was not a handkerchief. It was a paper bag glittering with gold braid, and contained such an assortment of sweets as lads bought for their lasses on the Muckle Friday.

“Hae, Bell,” said Sanders, handing the bag to Bell in an off-hand way as if it were but a trifle. Nevertheless he was a little excited, for he went off without saying good-night.

No one spoke. Bell’s face was crimson. T’nowhead fidgeted on his chair, and Lisbeth looked at Sam’l. The weaver was strangely calm and collected, though he would have liked to know whether this was a proposal.

“Sit in by to the table, Sam’l,” said Lisbeth, trying to look as if things were as they had been before.

She put a saucerful of butter, salt, and pepper near the fire to melt, for melted butter is the shoeing-horn that helps over a meal of potatoes. Sam’l, however, saw what the hour required, and jumping up, he seized his bonnet.

“Hing the tatties higher up the joist, Lisbeth,” he said with dignity; “I’se be back in ten meenits.”

He hurried out of the house, leaving the others looking at each other.

“What do ye think?” asked Lisbeth.

“I d’na kin,” faltered Bell.

“Thae tatties is lang o’ comin’ to the boil,” said T’nowhead.

In some circles a lover who behaved like Sam’l would have been suspected of intent upon his rival’s life, but neither Bell nor Lisbeth did the weaver that injustice. In a case of this kind it does not much matter what T’nowhead thought.

The ten minutes had barely passed when Sam’l was back in the farm kitchen. He was too flurried to knock this time, and, indeed, Lisbeth did not expect it of him.

“Bell, hae!” he cried, handing his sweetheart a tinsel bag twice the size of Sanders’ gift.

“Losh preserve’s!” exclaimed Lisbeth; “I’se warrant there’s a shillin’s worth.”

“There’s a’ that, Lisbeth–an’ mair,” said Sam’l firmly.

“I thank ye, Sam’l,” said Bell, feeling an unwonted elation as she gazed at the two paper bags in her lap.

“Ye’re ower extravegint, Sam’l,” Lisbeth said.

“Not at all,” said Sam’l; “not at all. But I widna advise ye to eat thae ither anes, Bell–they’re second quality.”

Bell drew back a step from Sam’l.

“How do ye kin?” asked the farmer shortly, for he liked Sanders.

“I speired i’ the shop,” said Sam’l.

The goblet was placed on a broken plate on the table with the saucer beside it, and Sam’l, like the others, helped himself. What he did was to take potatoes from the pot with his fingers, peel off their coats, and then dip them into the butter. Lisbeth would have liked to provide knives and forks, but she knew that beyond a certain point T’nowhead was master in his own house. As for Sam’l, he felt victory in his hands, and began to think that he had gone too far.

In the mean time Sanders, little witting that Sam’l had trumped his trick, was sauntering along the kirk-wynd with his hat on the side of his head. Fortunately he did not meet the minister.

The courting of T’nowhead’s Bell reached its crisis one Sabbath about a month after the events above recorded. The minister was in great force that day, but it is no part of mine to tell how he bore himself. I was there, and am not likely to forget the scene. It was a fateful Sabbath for T’nowhead’s Bell and her swains, and destined to be remembered for the painful scandal which they perpetrated in their passion.

Bell was not in the kirk. There being an infant of six months in the house it was a question of either Lisbeth or the lassie’s staying at home with him, and though Lisbeth was unselfish in a general way, she could not resist the delight of going to church. She had nine children besides the baby, and being but a woman, it was the pride of her life to march them into the T’nowhead pew, so well watched that they dared not misbehave, and so tightly packed that they could not fall. The congregation looked at that pew, the mothers enviously, when they sang the lines–

“Jerusalem like a city is
Compactly built together.”

The first half of the service had been gone through on this particular Sunday without anything remarkable happening. It was at the end of the psalm which preceded the sermon that Sanders Elshioner, who sat near the door, lowered his head until it was no higher than the pews, and in that attitude, looking almost like a four-footed animal, slipped out of the church. In their eagerness to be at the sermon many of the congregation did not notice him, and those who did put the matter by in their minds for future investigation. Sam’l, however, could not take it so coolly. From his seat in the gallery he saw Sanders disappear, and his mind misgave him. With the true lover’s instinct he understood it all. Sanders had been struck by the fine turn-out in the T’nowhead pew. Bell was alone at the farm. What an opportunity to work one’s way up to a proposal! T’nowhead was so over-run with children, that such a chance seldom occurred, except on a Sabbath. Sanders, doubtless, was off to propose, and he, Sam’l, was left behind.

The suspense was terrible. Sam’l and Sanders had both known all along that Bell would take the first of the two who asked her. Even those who thought her proud admitted that she was modest. Bitterly the weaver repented having waited so long. Now it was too late. In ten minutes Sanders would be at T’nowhead; in an hour all would be over. Sam’l rose to his feet in a daze. His mother pulled him down by the coat-tail, and his father shook him, thinking he was walking in his sleep. He tottered past them, however, hurried up the aisle, which was so narrow that Dan’l Ross could only reach his seat by walking sideways, and was gone before the minister could do more than stop in the middle of a whirl and gape in horror after him.

A number of the congregation felt that day the advantage of sitting in the laft. What was a mystery to those downstairs was revealed to them. From the gallery windows they had a fine open view to the south; and as Sam’l took the common; which was a short cut though a steep ascent, to T’nowhead, he was never out of their line of vision. Sanders was not to be seen, but they guessed rightly the reason why. Thinking he had ample time, he had gone round by the main road to save his boots–perhaps a little scared by what was coming. Sam’l’s design was to forestall him by taking the shorter path over the burn and up the commonty.

It was a race for a wife, and several onlookers in the gallery braved the minister’s displeasure to see who won. Those who favored Sam’l’s suit exultingly saw him leap the stream, while the friends of Sanders fixed their eyes on the top of the common where it ran into the road. Sanders must come into sight there, and the one who reached this point first would get Bell.

As Auld Lichts do not walk abroad on the Sabbath, Sanders would probably not be delayed. The chances were in his favor. Had it been any other day in the week Sam’l might have run. So some of the congregation in the gallery were thinking, when suddenly they saw him bend low and then take to his heels. He had caught sight of Sanders’ head bobbing over the hedge that separated the road from the common, and feared that Sanders might see him. The congregation who could crane their necks sufficiently saw a black object, which they guessed to be the carter’s hat, crawling along the hedge-top. For a moment it was motionless, and then it shot ahead. The rivals had seen each other. It was now a hot race. Sam’l, dissembling no longer, clattered up the common, becoming smaller and smaller to the on-lookers as he neared the top. More than one person in the gallery almost rose to their feet in their excitement. Sam’l had it. No, Sanders was in front. Then the two figures disappeared from view. They seemed to run into each other at the top of the brae, and no one could say who was first. The congregation looked at one another. Some of them perspired. But the minister held on his course.

Sam’l had just been in time to cut Sanders out. It was the weaver’s saving that Sanders saw this when his rival turned the corner; for Sam’l was sadly blown. Sanders took in the situation and gave in at once. The last hundred yards of the distance he covered at his leisure, and when he arrived at his destination he did not go in. It was a fine afternoon for the time of year, and he went round to have a look at the pig, about which T’nowhead was a little sinfully puffed up.

“Ay,” said Sanders, digging his fingers critically into the grunting animal; “quite so.”

“Grumph,” said the pig, getting reluctantly to his feet.

“Ou, ay; yes,” said Sanders, thoughtfully.

Then he sat down on the edge of the sty, and looked long and silently at an empty bucket. But whether his thoughts were of T’nowhead’s Bell, whom he had lost forever, or of the food the farmer fed his pig on, is not known.

“Lord preserve’s! Are ye no at the kirk?” cried Bell, nearly dropping the baby as Sam’l broke into the room,

“Bell!” cried Sam’l.

Then T’nowhead’s Bell knew that her hour had come.

“Sam’l,” she faltered.

“Will ye hae’s, Bell?” demanded Sam’l, glaring at her sheepishly.

“Ay,” answered Bell.

Sam’l fell into a chair.

“Bring’s a drink o’ water, Bell,” he said. But Bell thought the occasion required milk, and there was none in the kitchen. She went out to the byre, still with the baby in her arms, and saw Sanders Elshioner sitting gloomily on the pig-sty.

“Weel, Bell,” said Sanders.

“I thocht ye’d been at the kirk, Sanders,” said Bell.

Then there was a silence between them.

“Has Sam’l speired ye, Bell?” asked Sanders stolidly.

“Ay,” said Bell again, and this time there was a tear in her eye. Sanders was little better than an “orra man,” and Sam’l was a weaver, and yet–But it was too late now. Sanders gave the pig a vicious poke with a stick, and when it had ceased to grunt, Bell was back in the kitchen. She had forgotten about the milk, however, and Sam’l only got water after all.

In after days, when the story of Bell’s wooing was told, there were some who held that the circumstances would have almost justified the lassie in giving Sam’l the go-by. But these perhaps forgot that her other lover was in the same predicament as the accepted one–that of the two, indeed, he was the more to blame, for he set off to T’nowhead on the Sabbath of his own accord, while Sam’l only ran after him. And then there is no one to say for certain whether Bell heard of her suitors’ delinquencies until Lisbeth’s return from the kirk. Sam’l could never remember whether he told her, and Bell was not sure whether, if he did, she took it in. Sanders was greatly in demand for weeks after to tell what he knew of the affair, but though he was twice asked to tea to the manse among the trees, and subjected thereafter to ministerial cross-examinations, this is all he told. He remained at the pig-sty until Sam’l left the farm, when he joined him at the top of the brae, and they went home together.

“It’s yersel, Sanders,” said Sam’l.

“It is so, Sam’l,” said Sanders.

“Very cauld,” said Sam’l.

“Blawy,” assented Sanders.

After a pause–

“Sam’l,” said Sanders.

“Ay.”

“I’m hearin’ ye’re to be mairit.”

“Ay.”

“Weel, Sam’l, she’s a snod bit lassie.”

“Thank ye,” said Sam’l.

“I had ance a kin’ o’ notion o’ Bell mysel,” continued Sanders.

“Ye had?”

“Yes, Sam’l; but I thocht better o’t.”

“Hoo d’ye mean?” asked Sam’l, a little anxiously.

“Weel, Sam’l, mairitch is a terrible responsibeelity.”

“It is so,” said Sam’l, wincing.

“An’ no the thing to tak up withoot conseederation.”

“But it’s a blessed and honorable state, Sanders; ye’ve heard the minister on’t.”

“They say,” continued the relentless Sanders, “‘at the minister doesna get on sair wi’ the wife himsel.”

“So they do,” cried Sam’l, with a sinking at the heart.

“I’ve been telt,” Sanders went on, “‘at gin ye can get the upper han’ o’ the wife for a while at first, there’s the mair chance o’ a harmonious exeestence.”

“Bell’s no the lassie,” said Sam’l appealingly, “to thwart her man.”

Sanders smiled.

“D’ye think she is, Sanders?”

“Weel, Sam’l, I d’na want to fluster ye, but she’s been ower lang wi’ Lisbeth Fargus no to hae learnt her ways. An a’body kins what a life T’nowhead has wi’ her.”

“Guid sake, Sanders, hoo did ye no speak o’ this afore?”

“I thocht ye kent o’t, Sam’l.”

They had now reached the square, and the U.P. kirk was coming out. The Auld Licht kirk would be half an hour yet.

“But, Sanders,” said Sam’l, brightening up, “ye was on yer wy to spier her yer-sel.”

“I was, Sam’l,” said Sanders, “and I canna but be thankfu’ ye was ower quick for’s.”

“Gin’t hadna been you,” said Sam’l, “I wid never hae thocht o’t.”

“I’m sayin’ naething agin Bell,” pursued the other, “but, man Sam’l, a body should be mair deleeberate in a thing o’ the kind.”

“It was michty hurried,” said Sam’l, wo-fully.

“It’s a serious thing to spier a lassie,” said Sanders.

“It’s an awfu’ thing,” said Sam’l.

“But we’ll hope for the best,” added Sanders in a hopeless voice.

They were close to the Tenements now, and Sam’l looked as if he were on his way to be hanged.

“Sam’l!”

“Ay, Sanders.”

“Did ye–did ye kiss her, Sam’l?”

“Na.”

“Hoo?”

“There’s was varra little time, Sanders.”

“Half an ‘oor,” said Sanders.

“Was there? Man Sanders, to tell ye the truth, I never thocht o’t.”

Then the soul of Sanders Elshioner was filled with contempt for Sam’l Dickie.

The scandal blew over. At first it was expected that the minister would interfere to prevent the union, but beyond intimating from the pulpit that the souls of Sabbath-breakers were beyond praying for, and then praying for Sam’l and Sanders at great length, with a word thrown in for Bell, he let things take their course. Some said it was because he was always frightened lest his young men should intermarry with other denominations, but Sanders explained it differently to Sam’l.

“I hav’na a word to say agin the minister,” he said; “they’re gran’ prayers, but, Sam’l, he’s a mairit man himsel.”

“He’s a’ the better for that, Sanders, isna he?”

“Do ye no see,” asked Sanders compassionately, “‘at he’s tryin’ to mat the best o’t?”

“Oh, Sanders, man!” said Sam’l.

“Cheer up, Sam’l,” said Sanders, “it’ll sune be ower.”

Their having been rival suitors had not interfered with their friendship. On the contrary, while they had hitherto been mere acquaintances, they became inseparables as the wedding-day drew near. It was noticed that they had much to say to each other, and that when they could not get a room to themselves they wandered about together in the churchyard. When Sam’l had anything to tell Bell he sent Sanders to tell it, and Sanders did as he was bid. There was nothing that he would not have done for Sam’l.

The more obliging Sanders was, however, the sadder Sam’l grew. He never laughed now on Saturdays, and sometimes his loom was silent half the day. Sam’l felt that Sanders’ was the kindness of a friend for a dying man.

It was to be a penny wedding, and Lisbeth Fargus said it was delicacy that made Sam’l superintend the fitting-up of the barn by deputy. Once he came to see it in person, but he looked so ill that Sanders had to see him home. This was on the Thursday afternoon, and the wedding was fixed for Friday.

“Sanders, Sanders,” said Sam’l, in a voice strangely unlike his own, “it’ll a’ be ower by this time the morn.”

“It will,” said Sanders.

“If I had only kent her langer,” continued Sam’l.

“It wid hae been safer,” said Sanders.

“Did ye see the yallow floor in Bell’s bonnet?” asked the accepted swain.

“Ay,” said Sanders reluctantly.

“I’m dootin’–I’m sair dootin’ she’s but a flichty, light-hearted crittur after a’.”

“I had ay my suspeecions o’t,” said Sanders.

“Ye hae kent her langer than me,” said Sam’l.

“Yes,” said Sanders, “but there’s nae gettin’ at the heart o’ women. Man, Sam’l, they’re desperate cunnin’.”

“I’m dootin’t; I’m sair dootin’t.”

“It’ll be a warnin’ to ye, Sam’l, no to be in sic a hurry i’ the futur,” said Sanders.

Sam’l groaned.

“Ye’ll be gaein up to the manse to arrange wi’ the minister the morn’s mornin’,” continued Sanders, in a subdued voice.

Sam’l looked wistfully at his friend.

“I canna do’t, Sanders,” he said, “I canna do’t.”

“Ye maun,” said Sanders.

“It’s aisy to speak,” retorted Sam’l bitterly.

“We have a’ oor troubles, Sam’l,” said Sanders soothingly, “an’ every man maun bear his ain burdens. Johnny Davie’s wife’s dead, an’ he’s no repinin’.”

“Ay,” said Sam’l, “but a death’s no a mairitch. We hae haen deaths in our family too.”

“It may a’ be for the best,” added Sanders, “an’ there wid be a michty talk i’ the hale country-side gin ye didna ging to the minister like a man.”

“I maum hae langer to think o’t,” said Sam’l.

“Bell’s mairitch is the morn,” said Sanders decisively.

Sam’l glanced up with a wild look in his eyes.

“Sanders!” he cried.

“Sam’l!”

“Ye hae been a guid friend to me, Sanders, in this sair affliction.”

“Nothing ava,” said Sanders; “dount mention’d.”

“But, Sanders, ye canna deny but what your rinnin oot o’ the kirk that awfu’ day was at the bottom o’d a’.”

“It was so,” said Sanders bravely.

“An’ ye used to be fond o’ Bell, Sanders.”

“I dinna deny’t.”

“Sanders, laddie,” said Sam’l, bending forward and speaking in a wheedling voice, “I aye thocht it was you she likit.”

“I had some sic idea mysel,” said Sanders.

“Sanders, I canna think to pairt twa fowk sae weel suited to ane anither as you an’ Bell,”

“Canna ye, Sam’l?”

“She wid mak ye a guid wife, Sanders, I hae studied her weel, and she’s a thrifty, douce, clever lassie. Sanders, there’s no the like o’ her. Mony a time, Sanders, I hae said to mysel, ‘There’s a lass ony man micht be prood to tak.’ A’body says the same, Sanders, There’s nae risk ava, man: nane to speak o’. Tak her, laddie, tak her, Sanders; it’s a grand chance, Sanders. She’s yours for the spierin’. I’ll gie her up, Sanders.”

“Will ye, though?” said Sanders.

“What d’ye think?” asked Sam’l.

“If ye wid rayther,” said Sanders politely.

“There’s my han’ on’t,” said Sam’l. “Bless ye, Sanders; ye’ve been a true frien’ to me.”

Then they shook hands for the first time in their lives; and soon afterward Sanders struck up the brae to T’nowhead,

Next morning Sanders Elshioner, who had been very busy the night before, put on his Sabbath clothes and strolled up to the manse.

“But–but where is Sam’l?” asked the minister; “I must see himself.”

“It’s a new arrangement,” said Sanders.

“What do you mean, Sanders?”

“Bell’s to marry me,” explained Sanders.

“But–but what does Sam’l say?”

“He’s willin’,” said Sanders.

“And Bell?”

“She’s willin’, too. She prefers’t.”

“It is unusual,” said the minister.

“It’s a’ richt,” said Sanders.

“Well, you know best,” said the minister.

“You see the hoose was taen, at ony rate,” continued Sanders. “An’ I’ll juist ging in til’t instead o’ Sam’l.”

“Quite so.”

“An’ I cudna think to disappoint the lassie.”

“Your sentiments do you credit, Sanders,” said the minister; “but I hope you do not enter upon the blessed state of matrimony without full consideration of its responsibilities. It is a serious business, marriage.”

“It’s a’ that,” said Sanders, “but I’m willin’ to stan’ the risk.”

So, as soon as it could be done, Sanders Elshioner took to wife T’nowhead’s Bell, and I remember seeing Sam’l Dickie trying to dance at the penny wedding.

Years afterward it was said in Thrums that Sam’l had treated Bell badly, but he was never sure about it himself.

“It was a near thing–a michty near thing,” he admitted in the square.

“They say,” some other weaver would remark, “‘at it was you Bell liked best.”

“I d’na kin,” Sam’l would reply, “but there’s nae doot the lassie was fell fond o’ me. Ou, a mere passin’ fancy’s ye micht say.”

CHAPTER IX.

DAVIT LUNAN’S POLITICAL REMINISCENCES.

When an election-day comes round now, it takes me back to the time of 1832. I would be eight or ten year old at that time. James Strachan was at the door by five o’clock in the morning in his Sabbath clothes, by arrangement. We was to go up to the hill to see them building the bonfire. Moreover, there was word that Mr. Scrimgour was to be there tossing pennies, just like at a marriage. I was awakened before that by my mother at the pans and bowls. I have always associated elections since that time with jelly-making; for just as my mother would fill the cups and tankers and bowls with jelly to save cans, she was emptying the pots and pans to make way for the ale and porter. James and me was to help to carry it home from the square–him in the pitcher and me in a flagon, because I was silly for my age and not strong in the arms.

It was a very blowy morning, though the rain kept off, and what part of the bonfire had been built already was found scattered to the winds. Before we rose a great mass of folk was getting the barrels and things together again; but some of them was never recovered, and suspicion pointed to William Geddes, it being well known that William would not hesitate to carry off anything if unobserved. More by token Chirsty Lamby had seen him rolling home a barrowful of firewood early in the morning, her having risen to hold cold water in her mouth, being down with the toothache. When we got up to the hill everybody was making for the quarry, which being more sheltered was now thought to be a better place for the bonfire. The masons had struck work, it being a general holiday in the whole countryside. There was a great commotion of people, all fine dressed and mostly with glengarry bonnets; and me and James was well acquaint with them, though mostly weavers and the like and not my father’s equal. Mr. Scrimgour was not there himself; but there was a small active body in his room as tossed the money for him fair enough; though not so liberally as was expected, being mostly ha’pence where pennies was looked for. Such was not my father’s opinion, and him and a few others only had a vote. He considered it was a waste of money giving to them that had no vote and so taking out of other folks’ mouths; but the little man said it kept everybody in good-humor and made Mr. Scrimgour popular. He was an extraordinary affable man and very spirity, running about to waste no time in walking, and gave me a shilling, saying to me to be a truthful boy and tell my father. He did not give James anything, him being an orphan, but clapped his head and said he was a fine boy.

The captain was to vote for the bill if he got in, the which he did. It was the captain was to give the ale and the porter in the square like a true gentleman. My father gave a kind of laugh when I let him see my shilling, and said he would keep care of it for me; and sorry I was I let him get it, me never seeing the face of it again to this day. Me and James was much annoyed with the women, especially Kitty Davie, always pushing in when there was tossing, and tearing the very ha’pence out of our hands: us not caring so much about the money, but humiliated to see women mixing up in politics. By the time the topmost barrel was on the bonfire there was a great smell of whiskey in the quarry, it being a confined place. My father had been against the bonfire being in the quarry, arguing that the wind on the hill would have carried off the smell of the whiskey; but Peter Tosh said they did not want the smell carried off; it would be agreeable to the masons for weeks to come. Except among the women, there was no fighting nor wrangling at the quarry, but all in fine spirits.

I misremember now whether it was Mr. Scrimgour or the captain that took the fancy to my father’s pigs; but it was this day, at any rate, that the captain sent him the game-cock. Whichever one it was that fancied the litter of pigs, nothing would content him but to buy them, which he did at thirty shillings each, being the best bargain ever my father made. Nevertheless I’m thinking he was windier of the cock. The captain, who was a local man when not with his regiment, had the grandest collection of fighting-cocks in the county, and sometimes came into the town to try them against the town cocks. I mind well the large wicker cage in which they were conveyed from place to place, and never without the captain near at hand. My father had a cock that beat all the other town cocks at the cock-fight at our school, which was superintended by the elder of the kirk to see fair play; but the which died of its wounds the next day but one. This was a great grief to my father, it having been challenged to fight the captain’s cock. Therefore it was very considerate of the captain to make my father a present of his bird; father, in compliment to him, changing its name from the “Deil” to the “Captain.”

During the forenoon, and I think until well on in the day, James and me was busy with the pitcher and the flagon. The proceedings in the square, however, was not so well conducted as in the quarry, many of the folk there assembled showing a mean and grasping spirit. The captain had given orders that there was to be no stint of ale and porter, and neither there was; but much of it lost through hastiness. Great barrels was hurled into the middle of the square, where the country wives sat with their eggs and butter on market-day, and was quickly stove in with an axe or paving-stone or whatever came handy. Sometimes they would break into the barrel at different points; and then, when they tilted it up to get the ale out at one hole, it gushed out at the bottom till the square was flooded. My mother was fair disgusted when told by me and James of the waste of good liquor. It is gospel truth I speak when I say I mind well of seeing Singer Davie catching the porter in a pan as it ran down the sire, and when the pan was full to overflowing, putting his mouth to the stream and drinking till he was as full as the pan. Most of the men, however, stuck to the barrels, the drink running in the street being ale and porter mixed, and left it to the women and the young folk to do the carrying. Susy M’Queen brought as many pans as she could collect on a barrow, and was filling them all with porter, rejecting the ale; but indignation was aroused against her, and as fast as she filled the others emptied.

My father scorned to go to the square to drink ale and porter with the crowd, having the election on his mind and him to vote. Nevertheless he instructed me and James to keep up a brisk trade with the pans, and run back across the gardens in case we met dishonest folk in the streets who might drink the ale. Also, said my father, we was to let the excesses of our neighbors be a warning in sobriety to us; enough being as good as a feast, except when you can store it up for the winter. By and by my mother thought it was not safe me being in the streets with so many wild men about, and would have sent James himself, him being an orphan and hardier; but this I did not like, but, running out, did not come back for long enough. There is no doubt that the music was to blame for firing the men’s blood, and the result most disgraceful fighting with no object in view. There was three fiddlers and two at the flute, most of them blind, but not the less dangerous on that account; and they kept the town in a ferment, even playing the country-folk home to the farms, followed by bands of towns-folk. They were a quarrelsome set, the ploughmen and others; and it was generally admitted in the town that their overbearing behavior was responsible for the fights. I mind them being driven out of the square, stones flying thick; also some stand-up fights with sticks, and others fair enough with fists. The worst fight I did not see. It took place in a field. At first it was only between two who had been miscalling one another; but there was many looking on, and when the town man was like getting the worst of it the others set to, and a most heathenish fray with no sense in it ensued. One man had his arm broken. I mind Hobart the bellman going about ringing his bell and telling all persons to get within doors; but little attention was paid to him, it being notorious that Snecky had had a fight earlier in the day himself.

When James was fighting in the field, according to his own account, I had the honor of dining with the electors who voted for the captain, him paying all expenses. It was a lucky accident my mother sending me to the town-house, where the dinner came off, to try to get my father home at a decent hour, me having a remarkable power over him when in liquor, but at no other time. They were very jolly, however, and insisted on my drinking the captain’s health and eating more than was safe. My father got it next day from my mother for this; and so would I myself, but it was several days before I left my bed, completely knocked up as I was with the excitement and one thing or another. The bonfire, which was built to celebrate the election of Mr. Scrimgour, was set ablaze, though I did not see it, in honor of the election of the captain; it being thought a pity to lose it, as no doubt it would have been. That is about all I remember of the celebrated election of ’32 when the Reform Bill was passed.

CHAPTER X.

A VERY OLD FAMILY.

They were a very old family with whom Snecky Hobart, the bellman, lodged. Their favorite dissipation, when their looms had come to rest, was a dander through the kirk-yard. They dressed for it: the three young ones in their rusty blacks; the patriarch in his old blue coat, velvet knee-breeches, and broad blue bonnet; and often of an evening I have met them moving from grave to grave. By this time the old man was nearly ninety, and the young ones averaged sixty. They read out the inscriptions on the tombstones in a solemn drone, and their father added his reminiscences. He never failed them. Since the beginning of the century he had not missed a funeral, and his children felt that he was a great example. Sire and sons returned from the cemetery invigorated for their daily labors. If one of them happened to start a dozen yards behind the others, he never thought of making up the distance. If his foot struck against a stone, he came to a dead stop; when he discovered that he had stopped, he set off again.

A high wall shut off this old family’s house and garden, from the clatter of Thrums, a wall that gave Snecky some trouble before he went to live within it. I speak from personal knowledge. One spring morning, before the school-house was built, I was assisting the patriarch to divest the gaunt garden pump of its winter suit of straw. I was taking a drink, I remember, my palm over the mouth of the wooden spout and my mouth at the gimlet-hole above, when a leg appeared above the corner of the wall against which the hen-house was built. Two hands followed, clutching desperately at the uneven stones. Then the leg worked as if it were turning a grindstone, and next moment Snecky was sitting breathlessly on the dyke. From this to the hen-house, whose roof was of “divets,” the descent was comparatively easy, and a slanting board allowed the daring bellman to slide thence to the ground. He had come on business, and having talked it over slowly with the old man he turned to depart. Though he was a genteel man, I heard him sigh heavily as, with the remark, “Ay, weel, I’ll be movin’ again,” he began to rescale the wall. The patriarch, twisted round the pump, made no reply, so I ventured to suggest to the bellman that he might find the gate easier. “Is there a gate?” said Snecky, in surprise at the resources of civilization. I pointed it out to him, and he went his way chuckling. The old man told me that he had sometimes wondered at Snecky’s mode of approach, but it had not struck him to say anything. Afterward, when the bellman took up his abode there, they discussed the matter heavily.

Hobart inherited both his bell and his nickname from his father, who was not a native of Thrums. He came from some distant part where the people speak of snecking the door, meaning shut it. In Thrums the word used is steek, and sneck seemed to the inhabitants so droll and ridiculous that Hobart got the name of Snecky. His son left Thrums at the age of ten for the distant farm of Tirl, and did not return until the old bellman’s death, twenty years afterward; but the first remark he overheard on entering the kirk-wynd was a conjecture flung across the street by a gray-haired crone, that he would be “little Snecky come to bury auld Snecky.”

The father had a reputation in his day for “crying” crimes he was suspected of having committed himself, but the Snecky I knew had too high a sense of his own importance for that. On great occasions, such as the loss of little Davy Dundas, or when a tattie roup had to be cried, he was even offensively inflated: but ordinary announcements, such as the approach of a flying stationer, the roup of a deceased weaver’s loom, or the arrival in Thrums of a cart-load of fine “kebec” cheeses, he treated as the merest trifles. I see still the bent legs of the snuffy old man straightening to the tinkle of his bell, and the smirk with which he let the curious populace gather round him. In one hand he ostentatiously displayed the paper on which what he had to cry was written, but, like the minister, he scorned to “read.” With the bell carefully tucked under his oxter he gave forth his news in a rasping voice that broke now and again into a squeal. Though Scotch in his unofficial conversation, he was believed to deliver himself on public occasions in the finest English. When trotting from place to place with his news he carried his bell by the tongue as cautiously as if it were a flagon of milk.

Snecky never allowed himself to degenerate into a mere machine. His proclamations were provided by those who employed him, but his soul was his own. Having cried a potato roup he would sometimes add a word of warning, such as, “I wudna advise ye, lads, to hae ony-thing to do wi’ thae tatties; they’re diseased.” Once, just before the cattle market, he was sent round by a local laird to announce that any drover found taking the short cut to the hill through the grounds of Muckle Plowy would be prosecuted to the utmost limits of the law. The people were aghast. “Hoots, lads,” Snecky said; “dinna fash yoursels. It’s juist a haver o’ the grieve’s.” One of Hobart’s ways of striking terror into evil-doers was to announce, when crying a crime, that he himself knew perfectly well who the culprit was. “I see him brawly,” he would say, “standing afore me, an’ if he disna instantly mak retribution, I am determined this very day to mak a public example of him.”

Before the time of the Burke and Hare murders Snecky’s father was sent round Thrums to proclaim the startling news that a grave in the kirk-yard had been tampered with. The “resurrectionist” scare was at its height then, and the patriarch, who was one of the men in Thrums paid to watch new graves in the night-time, has often told the story. The town was in a ferment as the news spread, and there were fierce suspicious men among Hobart’s hearers who already had the rifler of graves in their eye.

He was a man who worked for the farmers when they required an extra hand, and loafed about the square when they could do without him. No one had a good word for him, and lately he had been flush of money. That was sufficient. There was a rush of angry men through the “pend” that led to his habitation, and he was dragged, panting and terrified, to the kirk-yard before he understood what it all meant. To the grave they hurried him, and almost without a word handed him a spade. The whole town gathered round the spot–a sullen crowd, the women only breaking the silence with their sobs, and the children clinging to their gowns. The suspected resurrectionist understood what was wanted of him, and, flinging off his jacket, began to reopen the grave. Presently the spade struck upon wood, and by and by part of the coffin came in view. That was nothing, for the resurrectionists had a way of breaking the coffin at one end and drawing out the body with tongs. The digger knew this. He broke the boards with the spade and revealed an arm. The people convinced, he dropped the arm savagely, leaped out of the grave and went his way, leaving them to shovel back the earth themselves.

There was humor in the old family as well as in their lodger. I found this out slowly. They used to gather round their peat fire in the evening, after the poultry had gone to sleep on the kitchen rafters, and take off their neighbors. None of them ever laughed; but their neighbors did afford them subject for gossip, and the old man was very sarcastic over other people’s old-fashioned ways. When one of the family wanted to go out he did it gradually. He would be sitting “into the fire” browning his corduroy trousers, and he would get up slowly. Then he gazed solemnly before him for a time, and after that, if you watched him narrowly, you would see that he was really moving to the door. Another member of the family took the vacant seat with the same precautions. Will’um, the eldest, has a gun, which customarily stands behind the old eight-day clock; and he takes it with him to the garden to shoot the blackbirds. Long before Will’um is ready to let fly, the blackbirds have gone away; and so the gun is never, never fired; but there is a determined look on Will’um’s face when he returns from the garden.

In the stormy days of his youth the old man had been a “Black Nib.” The Black Nibs were the persons who agitated against the French war; and the public feeling against them ran strong and deep. In Thrums the local Black Nibs were burned in effigy, and whenever they put their heads out of doors they risked being stoned. Even where the authorities were unprejudiced they were helpless to interfere; and as a rule they were as bitter against the Black Nibs as the populace themselves. Once the patriarch was running through the street with a score of the enemy at his heels, and the bailie, opening his window, shouted to them, “Stane the Black Nib oot o’ the toon!”

When the patriarch was a young man he was a follower of pleasure. This is the one thing about him that his family have never been able to understand. A solemn stroll through the kirk-yard was not sufficient relaxation in those riotous times, after a hard day at the loom; and he rarely lost a chance of going to see a man hanged. There was a good deal of hanging in those days; and yet the authorities had an ugly way of reprieving condemned men on whom the sight-seers had been counting. An air of gloom would gather on my old friend’s countenance when he told how he and his contemporaries in Thrums trudged every Saturday for six weeks to the county town, many miles distant, to witness the execution of some criminal in whom they had local interest, and who, after disappointing them again and again, was said to have been bought off by a friend. His crime had been stolen entrance into a house in Thrums by the chimney, with intent to rob; and though this old-fashioned family did not see it, not the least noticeable incident in the scrimmage that followed was the prudence of the canny housewife. When she saw the legs coming down the lum, she rushed to the kail-pot which was on the fire and put on the lid. She confessed that this was not done to prevent the visitor’s scalding himself, but to save the broth.

The old man was repeated in his three sons. They told his stories precisely as he did himself, taking as long in the telling and making the points in exactly the same way. By and by they will come to think that they themselves were of those past times. Already the young ones look like contemporaries of their father.

CHAPTER XI

LITTLE RATHIE’S “BURAL.”

Devout-under-difficulties would have been the name of Lang Tammas had he been of Covenanting times. So I thought one wintry afternoon, years before I went to the school-house, when he dropped in to ask the pleasure of my company to the farmer of Little Rathie’s “bural.” As a good Auld Licht, Tammas reserved his swallow-tail coat and “lum hat” (chimney-pot) for the kirk and funerals; but the coat would have flapped villanously, to Tammas’ eternal ignominy, had he for one rash moment relaxed his hold of the bottom button, and it was only by walking sideways, as horses sometimes try to do, that the hat could be kept at the angle of decorum. Let it not he thought that Tammas had asked me to Little Rathie’s funeral on his own responsibility. Burials were among the few events to break the monotony of an Auld Licht winter, and invitations were as much sought after as cards to my lady’s dances in the south. This had been a fair average season for Tammas, though of his four burials one had been a bairn’s–a mere bagatelle; but had it not been for the death of Little Rathie I would probably not have been out that year at all.

The small farm of Little Rathie lies two miles from Thrums, and Tammas and I trudged manfully through the snow, adding to our numbers as we went. The dress of none differed materially from the precentor’s, and the general effect was of septuagenarians in each other’s best clothes, though living in low-roofed houses had bent most of them before their time. By a rearrangement of garments, such as making Tammas change coat, hat, and trousers with Cragiebuckle, Silva McQueen, and Sam’l Wilkie respectively, a dexterous tailor might perhaps have supplied each with a “fit.” The talk was chiefly of Little Rathie, and sometimes threatened to become animated, when another mourner would fall in and restore the more fitting gloom.

“Ay, ay,” the new-comer would say, by way of responding to the sober salutation, “Ay, Johnny.” Then there was silence, but for the “gluck” with which we lifted our feet from the slush.

“So Little Rathie’s been ta’en awa’,” Johnny would venture to say by and by.

“He’s gone, Johnny; ay, man, he is so.”

“Death must come to all,” some one would waken up to murmur.

“Ay,” Lang Tammas would reply, putting on the coping-stone, “in the morning we are strong and in the evening we are cut down.”

“We are so, Tammas; ou ay, we are so; we’re here the wan day an’ gone the neist.”

“Little Rathie wasna a crittur I took till; no, I canna say he was,” said Bowie Haggart, so called because his legs described a parabola, “but be maks a vary creeditable corp [corpse]. I will say that for him. It’s wonderfu’ hoo death improves a body. Ye cudna hae said as Little Rathie was a weel-faured man when he was i’ the flesh.”

Bowie was the wright, and attended burials in his official capacity. He had the gift of words to an uncommon degree, and I do not forget his crushing blow at the reputation of the poet Burns, as delivered under the auspices of the Thrums Literary Society. “I am of opeenion,” said Bowie, “that the works of Burns is of an immoral tendency. I have not read them myself, but such is my opeenion.”

“He was a queer stock, Little Rathie, michty queer,” said Tammas Haggart, Bowie’s brother, who was a queer stock himself, but was not aware of it; “but, ou, I’m thinkin’ the wife had something to do wi’t. She was ill to manage, an’ Little Rathie hadna the way o’ the women. He hadna the knack o’ managin’ them’s yo micht say–no, Little Rathie hadna the knack.”

“They’re kittle cattle, the women,” said the farmer of Craigiebuckle–son of the Craigiebuckle mentioned elsewhere–a little gloomily. “I’ve often thocht maiterimony is no onlike the lucky bags th’ auld wifies has at the muckly. There’s prizes an’ blanks baith inside, but, losh, ye’re far frae sure what ye’ll draw oot when ye put in yer han’.”

“Ou, weel,” said Tammas complacently, “there’s truth in what ye say, but the women can be managed if ye have the knack.”

“Some o’ them,” said Cragiebuckle woefully.

“Ye had yer wark wi’ the wife yersel, Tammas, so ye had,” observed Lang Tammas, unbending to suit his company.

“Ye’re speakin’ aboot the bit wife’s bural,” said Tammas Haggart, with a chuckle; “ay, ay, that brocht her to reason.”

Without much pressure Haggart retold a story known to the majority of his hearers. He had not the “knack” of managing women apparently when he married, for he and his gypsy wife “agreed ill thegither” at first. Once Chirsty left him and took up her abode in a house just across the wynd. Instead of routing her out, Tammas, without taking any one into his confidence, determined to treat Chirsty as dead, and celebrate her decease in a “lyke wake”–a last wake. These wakes were very general in Thrums in the old days, though they had ceased to be common by the date of Little Rathie’s death. For three days before the burial the friends and neighbors of the mourners were invited into the house to partake of food and drink by the side of the corpse. The dead lay on chairs covered with a white sheet. Dirges were sung and the deceased was extolled, but when night came the lights were extinguished and the corpse was left alone. On the morning of the funeral tables were spread with a white cloth outside the house, and food and drink were placed upon them. No neighbor could pass the tables without paying his respects to the dead; and even when the house was in a busy, narrow thoroughfare, this part of the ceremony was never omitted. Tammas did not give Chirsty a wake inside the house; but one Friday morning–it was market-day, and the square was consequently full–it went through the town that the tables were spread before his door. Young and old collected, wandering round the house, and Tammas stood at the tables in his blacks inviting every one to eat and drink. He was pressed to tell what it meant; but nothing could be got from him except that his wife was dead. At times he pressed his hands to his heart, and then he would make wry faces, trying hard to cry. Chirsty watched from a window across the street, until she perhaps began to fear that she really was dead. Unable to stand it any longer, she rushed out into her husband’s arms, and shortly afterward she could have been seen dismantling the tables.

“She’s gone this fower year,” Tammas said, when he had finished his story, “but up to the end I had no more trouble wi’ Chirsty. No, I had the knack o’ her.’

“I’ve heard tell, though,” said the sceptical Craigiebuckle, “as Chirsty only cam back to ye because she cudna bear to see the fowk makkin’ sae free wi’ the whiskey.”

“I mind hoo she bottled it up at ance and drove the laddies awa’,” said Bowie, “an’ I hae seen her after that, Tammas, giein’ ye up yer fut an’ you no sayin’ a word.”

“Ou, ay,” said the wife-tamer, in the tone of a man who could afford to be generous in trifles, “women maun talk, an’ a man hasna aye time to conterdick them, but frae that day I had the knack o’ Chirsty.”