When I had put down the question, in a jiffie she wrote down beside it, “That boy comes from the high green hills, and his name is Mungo.”
Dog on it! this astonished us more and more, and fairly bamboozled my understanding; as I thought there surely must be some league and paction with the Old One; but the further in the deeper. She then pointed to my wife, writing down, “Your name is Nancy”—and turning to me, as she made some dumbie signs, she chalked down, “Your name is Mansie Wauch, that saved the precious life of an old bedridden woman from the fire; and will soon get a lottery ticket of twenty thousand pounds.”
Knowing the truth of the rest of what she had said, I could not help jumping on the floor with joy, and seeing that she was up to every thing, as plain as if it had happened in her presence. The good news set us all a skipping like young lambs, my wife and the laddies clapping their hands as if they had found a fiddle; so, jealousing they might lose their discretion in their mirth, I turned round to the three, holding up my hand, and saying, “In the name o’ Gudeness, dinna mention this to ony leeving sowl; as, mind ye, I havena taken out the ticket yet. The doing so might not only set them to the sinful envying of our good fortune, as forbidden in the tenth commandment, but might lead away ourselves to be gutting our fish before we get them.”
“Mind then,” said Nanse, “about your promise to me, concerning the silk gown, and the pair”—
“Wheesht, wheesht, gudewifie,” answered I. “There’s a braw time coming. We must not be in ower great a hurry.”
I then bade the woman sit down by the ingle cheek, and our wife to give her a piece of cold beef, and a shave of bread, besides twopence out of my own pocket. Some, on hearing siccan sums mentioned, would have immediately struck work, but, even in the height of my grand expectations, I did not forget the old saying, that “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush;” and being thrang with a pair of leggins for Eben Bowsie, I brushed away ben to the workshop, thinking the woman, or witch, or whatever she was, would have more freedom and pleasure in
eating by herself.—That she had, I am now bound to say by experience.
Two days after, when we were sitting at our comfortable four-hours, in came little Benjie, running out of breath—just at the individual moment of time my wife and me were jeering one another, about how we would behave when we came to be grand ladies and gentlemen, keeping a flunkie maybe—to tell us, that when he was playing at the bools, on the plainstones before the old kirk, he had seen the deaf and dumb spaewife harled away to the tolbooth, for stealing a pair of trowsers that were hanging drying on a tow in Juden Elshinder’s back close. I could scarcely credit the callant, though I knew he would not tell a lie for sixpence; and I said to him, “Now be sure, Benjie, before ye speak. The tongue is a dangerous weapon, and apt to bring folk into trouble—it might be another woman.”
It was real cleverality in the callant. He said, “Ay, faither, but it was her; and she contrived to bring herself into trouble without a tongue at a’.”
I could not help laughing at this, it showed Benjie to be such a genius; so he said,