“That one is nonsense, Donal,” she said. “Isn’t it now? How could a man be a burn, or a wind, or the sun? But poets are silly. Papa says so.”
In his mind Donal did not know which way to look; physically, he regarded the ground. Happily at that very moment Hornie caused a diversion, and Gibbie understood what Donal was feeling too well to make even a pretence of going after her. I must, to his praise, record the fact that, instead of wreaking his mortification upon the cow, Donal spared her several blows out of gratitude for the deliverance her misbehaviour had wrought him. He was in no haste to return to his audience. To have his first poem thus rejected was killing. She was but a child who had so unkindly criticized it, but she was the child he wanted to please; and for a few moments life itself seemed scarcely worth having. He called himself a fool, and resolved never to read another poem to a girl so long as he lived. By the time he had again walked through the burn, however, he was calm and comparatively wise, and knew what to say.
“Div ye hear yon burn efter ye gang to yer bed, mem?” he asked Ginevra, as he climbed the bank, pointing a little lower down the stream to the mountain brook which there joined it.
“Always,” she answered. “It runs right under my window.”
“What kin’ o’ a din dis ’t mak?” he asked again.
“It is different at different times,” she answered. “It sings and chatters in summer, and growls and cries and grumbles in winter, or after rain up in Glashgar.”
“Div ye think the burn’s ony happier i’ the summer, mem?”
“No, Donal; the burn has no life in it, and therefore can’t be happier one time than another.”
“Weel, mem, I wad jist like to speir what waur it is to fancy yersel’ a burn, than to fancy the burn a body, ae time singin’ an’ chatterin’, an’ the neist growlin’ an’ grum’lin’.”
“Well, but, Donal, can a man be a burn?”