CALF-LOVE.
Just after I was put to my ’prenticeship, having made free choice of the tailoring trade, I had a terrible stound of calf-love. Never shall I forget it. I was growing up, long and lank as a willow-wand, brawns to my legs there were none, as my trowsers of other years too visibly effected to show. The long yellow hair hung down, like a flax-wig, the length of my lantern jaws, which looked, notwithstanding my yapness and stiff appetite, as if eating and they had broken up acquaintanceship. My blue jacket seemed in the sleeves to have picket a quarrel with the wrists, and had retreated to a tait below the elbows. The haunch-buttons, on the contrary appeared to have taken a strong liking to the shoulders, a little below which they showed their tarnished brightness. At the middle of the back the tails terminated, leaving the well-worn rear of my corduroys, like a full moon seen through a dark haze. Oh! but I must have been a bonny lad.
My first flame was the minister’s lassie, Jess, a buxom and forward queen, two or three years older than myself. I used to sit looking at her in the kirk, and felt a droll confusion when our een met. It dirled through my heart like a dart, and I looked down at my psalm-book sheepish and blushing. Fain would I have spoken to her, but it would not do; my courage aye failed me at the pinch, though she whiles gave me a smile when she passed me. She used to go to the well every night with her twa stoups, to draw water after the manner of the Israelites at gloaming; so I thought of watching to give her the two apples which I had carried in my pouch for more than a week for that purpose. How she laughed when I stappit them into her hand, and brushed by without speaking? I stood at the bottom of the close listening, and heard her laughing till she was like to split. My heart flap flappit in my breast like a pair of fanners. It was a moment of heavenly hope; but I saw Jamie Coom, the blacksmith, who I aye jealoused was my rival, coming down to the well. I saw her give him one of the apples: and hearing him say with a loud gaffaw, “Where is the tailor?” I took to my heels, and never stopped till I found myself on the little stool by the fireside, and the hamely sound of my mother’s wheel bum-bumming in my lug, like a gentle lullaby.
Every noise I heard flustered me, but I calmed in time, though I went to my bed without my supper. When I was driving out the gaislings to the grass on the next morn, who was it my ill fate to meet but the blacksmith. “Ou, Mansie,” said Jamie Coom, “are ye gaun to take me for your best man? I hear you are to be cried in the kirk on Sunday?”
“Me!” answered I, shaking and staring.
“Yes!” said he, “Jess the minister’s maid told me last night, that you had been giving up your name at the manse. Ay, it’s ower true—for she showed me the apples ye gied her in a present. This is a bonny story, Mansie, my man, and you only at your ’prenticeship yet.”
Terror and despair had struck me dumb. I stood as still and as stiff as a web of buckram. My tongue was tied and I couldna contradict him. Jamie faulded his arms, and gaed away whistling, turning every now and then his sooty face over his shoulder, and mostly sticking his tune, as he could not keep his mouth screwed for laughing. What would I not have given to have laughed to!
There was no time to be lost; this was the Saturday. The next rising sun would shine on the Sabbath. Ah, what a case I was in I could mostly have drowned myself, had I not been frighted. What could I do? My love had vanished like lightning: but oh, I was in a terrible gliff! Instead of gundy, I sold my thrums to Mrs Walnut for a penny, with which I bought at the counter a sheet of paper and a pen; so that in the afternoon I wrote out a letter to the minister, telling him what I had been given to hear, and begging him, for the sake of mercy, not to believe Jess’s word, as I was not able to keep a wife, and as she was a leeing gipsy.