You must remember he was an illiterate ploughman, reader.
“O Glancer, Glancer!” he cried; “oh! my poor dead friend Glancer, will I never mair clean your harness, or lead you to the fields in the mornin’? O Glancer, my heart is br’akin’! my heart is br’akin’!”
And so he kept on for a time, until Sandie insisted on leading him homewards.
But Jamie wasn’t well for days.
The next death at Kilbuie occurred about two weeks after this, and affected Mrs. M‘Crae and her two children more than any one else. It was that of Crummie, a cow nearly fifteen years old, but yet in calf. She took what is called the “quarter-ill,” or mortification of one joint or limb, and quickly succumbed. There was a halo of romance about this wise old cow. Like the bovine in the old Scotch song called “Tak’ your auld cloak about you”—
“Crummie was a usefu’ coo,
And aft she wet the bairnie’s mou’.”
Ah! that was just where the sorrow came in. Long, long ago, when Sandie and Elsie were but toddling thingies, in the bright and early days of her husband’s love, when all was hope and happiness about the smiling farm, and sorrow seemed very far away indeed, that old-fashioned cow had given the milk for the bairnies’ porridge, and the cream for butter. During all these long years she had kept the same stall in the byre, and woe be to any other cow beast that thoughtlessly dared to enter it. The retribution was sharp and swift.
Hardly ever a day passed either that, before going to her stall, after having been out for water or away in the green fields, Crummie did not come to the back door and knock with her head, and Mrs. M‘Crae, or Jeannie latterly, would present her with a nice piece of oat-cake, after which she would gracefully retire, that is as gracefully as a cow can, walking backwards a considerable way, as if she had been in the presence of royalty.
But now Crummie was “nae mair,” as Jeannie phrased it, and the bairns and the mother were inconsolable.
In a week more the calf would have been born. As it was, its skin was utilised. There is a curious but rather beautiful superstition away in northern Aberdeenshire, namely, that the very large family or hall Bible should be covered with the skin of a calf that has never been born. So poor Crummie’s calf’s skin was used by M‘Crae to cover his great Brown’s Bible.