for having the impudence to go for to be so bold as dishonour the cloth; and though he may get his bit orra half-a-guinea whiles, for holding forth in some bit country kirk, to a wheen shepherds and their dogs, when the minister himself, staring with the fat of good living and little work, is lying ill of a bile fever, or has the gout in his muckle toe, yet he has aye the miseries of uncertainty to encounter; his coat grows bare in the cuffs, greasy in the neck, and brown between the shouthers; his jawbones get long and lank, his een sunk, and his head grey wi’ vexation, and what the wise Solomon calls ‘hope deferred’; so at long and last, friendless and penniless, he takes the incurable complaint of a broken heart, and is buried out of the gate, in some bit strange corner of the kirkyard.”
“Stop, stop, gudeman,” cried Nanse, half greeting, “that’s an awfu’ business; but I daresay it’s owre true. But mightna we breed him a doctor? It seems they have unco profits; and, as he’s sae clever, he might come to be a graduit.”
“Doctor!” answered I—“Keh, keh, let that flee stick i’ the wa’; it’s a’ ye ken about it. If ye was only aware of what doctors had to do and see, between dwining weans and crying wives, ye would have thought twice before ye let that out. How de ye think our callant has a heart within him to look at folk blooding like sheep, or to sew up cutted throats with a silver needle and silk thread, as I would stitch
a pair of trowsers; or to trepan out pieces of coloured skulls, filling up the hole with an iron plate; and pull teeth, maybe the only ones left, out of auld women’s heads, and so on, to say nothing of rampauging with dark lanterns and double-tweel dreadnoughts, about gousty kirkyards, among humlock and long nettles, the haill night over, like spunkie—shoving the dead corpses, winding-sheets and all, into corn-sacks, and boiling their bones, after they have dissected all the red flesh off them, into a big caudron, to get out the marrow to make drogs of?”
“Eh, stop, stop, Mansie!” cried Nanse holding up her hands.
“Na,” continued I, “but it’s a true bill—it’s as true as ye are sitting there. And do ye think that any earthly compensation, either gowpins of gowd by way of fees, or yellow chariots to ride in, with a black servant sticking up behind, like a sign over a tobacconist’s door, can ever make up for the loss of a man’s having all his feelings seared to iron, and his soul made into whinstone, yea, into the nether-millstone, by being art and part in sic dark and devilish abominations? Go away wi’ siccan downright nonsense. Hearken, to my words, Nanse, my dear. The happiest man is he that can live quietly and soberly on the earnings of his industry, pays his day and way, works not only to win the bread of life for his wife and weans, but because he kens that idle-set is sinful; keeps a
pure heart towards God and man; and, caring not for the fashion of this world, departs from it in the hope of going, through the merits of his Redeemer, to a better.”
“Ye are right, after a’,” said Nanse, giving me a pat on the shouther; and finding who was her master as well as spouse—“I’ll wad it become me to gang for to gie advice to my betters. Tak’ your will of the business, gudeman; and if ye dinna mak’ him an admiral, just mak’ him what ye like.”
Now is the time, thought I to myself, to carry out my point, finding the drappikie I had taken with Donald M’Naughton, in settling his account for the green jacket, still working in my noddle, and giving me a power of words equal to Mr Blouster, the Cameronian preacher,—now is the time, for I still saw the unleavened pride of womankind wambling within her like a serpent that has got a knock on the pow, and been cast down but not destroyed; so taking a hearty snuff out of my box, and drawing it up first one nostril, then another, syne dighting my finger and thumb on my breek-knees, “What think ye,” said I, “of a sweep? Were it not for getting their faces blacked like savages, a sweep is not such a bad trade after a’; though, to be sure, going down lums six stories high, head-foremost, and landing upon the soles of their feet upon the hearth-stone, like a kittlin, is no just so pleasant.” Ye observe, it was only to
throw cold wayter on the unthrifty flame of a mother’s pride that I said this, and to pull down uppishness from its heathenish temple in the heart, head-foremost. So I looked to her, to hear how she would come on.