But before I begin to talk about the manse, I want to write down a conversation which took place on Monday morning as we journeyed, in which Mr Cameron told us some curious things that I do not wish to forget. We were driving through such a pretty little village, and in one of the doorways an old woman sat with her knitting.
“Oh, look at that dear old woman!” cries Flora. “How pleasant she looks, with her clean white apron and mutch!”
“Much, Flora?” said I. “What do you mean?” I thought it such an odd word to use. What was she much?
Flora looked puzzled, and Mr Cameron answered for her, with amusement in his eyes.
“A mutch, young lady,” said he, “is what you in the South call a cap.”
“The South!” cried I. “Why, Mr Cameron, you do not think we live in the South?”
I felt almost vexed that he should fancy such a thing. For all that Grandmamma and my Aunt Dorothea used to say, I always look down upon the South. All the people I have seen who came from the South seemed to me to have a great deal of wiliness and foolishness, and no commonsense. I suppose the truth is that there are agreeable people, and good people, in the South, only they have not come my way.
When I cried out like that, Mr Cameron laughed.
“Well,” said he, “north and south are comparative terms. We in Scotland think all England ‘the South,’—and so it is, if you will think a moment. You in Cumberland, I suppose, draw the line at the Trent or the Humber; lower down, they employ the Thames; and a Surrey man thinks Sussex is the South. ’Tis all a matter of comparison.”
“What does a Sussex man call the South?” said Angus.