A Highland minister, after the services of the Sunday were over, was noticed sauntering by himself in meditative mood along the hillside above the manse. Next day he was waited on by one of the ruling elders, who came to point out the sin of which he had been guilty, and the evil effect which his lapse from right ways could not fail to have in the parish. The clergyman took the rebuke in good part, but tried to show the remonstrant that the action of which he complained was innocent and lawful, and he was about to cite the famous example of a Sabbath walk, with the plucking of the ears of corn, as set forth in the Gospels, when he was interrupted with the remark: ‘Ou ay, sir, I ken weel what you mean to say; but, for my pairt, I hae nefer thocht the better o’ them for breakin’ the Sawbbath.’
A member of the Geological Survey was, not many years ago, storm-stayed in a muirland tract of South Ayrshire upon a Saturday, and gladly accepted the hospitality of a farmer for the night. Next morning he asked the servant if she thought her master could oblige him with the loan of a razor. In due time the razor arrived, but was found to be so wofully blunt that the maid had to be summoned again to see if a strop was available. She soon came back with this message, ‘Please, the maister says this is the Sawbbath, and ye’re jist to put pith to the razor. Ye canna get the strop.’
FAST-DAY SUPERSTITION
The late Lord Playfair, when he was Professor of Chemistry in the University of Edinburgh, told me that, passing his nursery-door one Sunday, he overheard the nurse stilling a child in this fashion: ‘Whisht, whisht, my bonnie lamb; it’s the Sawbbath, or I wud whustle ye a sang, but I’ll sing ye a paraphrase.’
The sacredness of the Sabbath, by a natural transition, came to be also attributed to the Fast Day, which heralded the half-yearly Communion-Sunday. A Fife shepherd, who was in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh on a week-day, found that his dog had strayed to some distance, and was making off in a wrong direction. He begged an acquaintance whom he had met to whistle for the animal. ‘Whustle on your ain dowg,’ was the indignant reply. ‘Na, na, man,’ said the perturbed drover. ‘I canna dae that, for you see it’s our Fast Day in Kirkcaldy.’
Nobody has satirised the Scottish perversion of the day of rest with more effective sarcasm than Lord Neaves in his Lyric for Saturday Night:
We zealots made up of stiff clay,
The sour-looking children of sorrow,
While not over-jolly to-day,
Resolve to be wretched to-morrow.