"OF INCREDIBLE BASHFULNESS AND BUCOLICAL APPEARANCE."
A certain local young laird, of incredible bashfulness and bucolical appearance, is a frequent visitor at the manse, and the fervent admirer of Miss Wee-Wee, who cannot endure the tedium of his society, and is constantly endeavouring to escape therefrom.
Now his name is Mr Crum, and I have frequently entertained her in private by play upon the word, alluding to him as "Mister Crust," "Mister Oatcake," or "the Scotch Bun," and the like; but he informed me that he preferred to be addressed as "Balbannock," and upon my inquiring his reasons for selecting such an alias, he answered that it was because he inhabited a house of that name.
Whereupon I facetiously requested that he would address myself in future as "Mister Seventy-nine, Hereford Road, Bayswater," which stroke of wit occasioned inextinguishable merriment from Miss Wee-Wee, though it did not excite from the aforesaid laird so much as the smallest simper!
From an ingrained love of teasing, and also the natural desire to stimulate her appreciation of my superior fertility in small talk and l'art de plaire, I do often slyly contrive to inflict his sole society upon her—to the huge entertainment of her father and mother, who carry on the joke by assisting my manœuvrings; but, although it affords me a flattering gratification to be plaintively upbraided by Miss Wee-Wee for my cruel desertion, I am resolved not to persist in such heartless pranks beyond her natural endurance.
Shortly after my arrival I heard from my host that he was the recipient of an invitation from a Mister Bagshot, Q.C., that he and his son Howard would accompany him to a shooting expedition upon some adjacent moors, and that, being now immoderately plump, and past his prime as a potshot, he had requested leave to nominate myself as his budli or substitute, explaining that I was a young Indian prince of great prowess at every kind of big games.
Accordingly, to my great delight, it was arranged that I should take his place.
My young friend Howard, beholding me appear at the breakfast-table arrayed in my short kilt and superincumbent belly-purse with tassels, did entreat me to change myself into ordinary knickerbockers, lest I should catch death with a cold.
But I declined, disdaining such dangers, and assuring him that I did not at all dislike the excessive ventilation of my knees.