In the first harvest-moon the miller and she were married. There was a wedding-breakfast, a wedding-dinner, ay, and a wedding-ball. To this latter came all the flower of the country; it was held in the old mill, and began as early as six in the evening. Never before in the country-side had such a rant been seen or heard tell of. There were three small fiddles and a blind bass, besides a clarionet and a squinting fifer;—what do you think of that for music? And there were four-and-twenty “sweetie wives”[7] round the door, with baskets full to the brim; and they were all sold out before morning,—think of that. Now the English reader has little notion how important a personage a “sweetie-wife” is at a country ball. The “sweeties” are made up in little ornamented sixpenny bags, and to these a young man treats his partner after a dance; so you may tell how any girl is appreciated by the number of bags of sweeties in her possession. Highest of all is the belle of the ball herself,—a lovely and stately girl, who will only dance with men with beards, and who has so many bags that her pockets will hold no more; so she keeps dealing them out with a queenly hand, to her plainer and less fair friends. Then there are stars of lesser magnitude, with enough but none to spare; and minor constellations, with perhaps a dozen bags; and there are ten-bag beauties, and seven-bag beauties, and five-bag beauties, three-bag beauties, and beauties with never a bag at all, who have only been thought worthy of getting their sweeties in loose handfuls.
Ay, that was a ball. The miller had given orders that the lads and lasses should “dance the day-light in,” and that not even a “sweetie-wife” should go home sober. Then, hey! how the fiddlers played! Hey! how the dancers danced! and hey! how the sweeties flew!
And when, during a lull, the miller himself and his pretty wife came in to dance one reel, just for fashion sake,—oh, dear! wasn’t the floor quickly filled? The fiddlers played as they hadn’t played yet; and the way the old blind bass screwed his mouth, and turned up the whites of his eyes was a caution to see. The tune was that rattling old Scotch strathspey, “The Miller of Drone”; and you should just have heard the cracking of thumbs and the hooch-!-ing,—if you had had a single drop of Scottish blood, twelve generations removed, you would have been on your pins at once. But when they came to the reel, the hoochs! were fired off like pistol shots, till they ended in one jubilant hurrah!! and the rafters rang as the music stopped. Then steaming whiskey punch was handed round in bumpers from buckets, and all drank the miller’s health, and the miller’s wife’s health, and long life and happiness, and three times three, with Highland honours. Then the miller and his bride drove off,—in a real carriage and pair, mind you; with wedding-favours on the horses’ heads, and tassels at their ears, oh! none of your half-and-half affairs; and eight-and-forty old shoes from four-and-twenty old sweetie wives, came whistling after them, as they rattled round the corner and were lost to view.
I am in a position to state, that John and his Nannie spent a most happy honeymoon in the Highlands of their native land, in that most pleasant of all seasons when the bloom still lingers on the heather and the autumn tints are on the trees.
Years have fled since then, but the old mill-wheel goes merrily round as in the days of yore; and Nannie and John are still alive, and likely to live for many a long year. And when the miller returns from his labour of an evening to his home in the pine-wood, there are a clean fireside and a singing kettle to welcome him; and better still, a little curly-haired boy with his mother’s eyes, and a wee baby-girl with its father’s dimples and its mother’s smile. Pussy is getting old, but in the long fore-nights of winter she loves to play with the little ones on the rug, or lull them to sleep with her drowsy purr; but, when “summer days are fine,” she will follow them far a-field, and the children gather gowans on the leas and string them into garlands to hang around her neck; and at sundown, pussy, they think, must be very tired; the good-natured cat humours the bairnies’ fancy, and pretends to be nothing short of dead-beat, and so they carry pussy home.