After drinking and putting the glass down on the table, I was drying my long moustache with my handkerchief, and looking at the lassie thoughtfully—I trust not admiringly.
“Ah, sir,” she said, nodding her head and smiling, “ye need na be wiping your mouth; you’re no goin’ to get a kiss from me.”
But near Tweedmouth, in the fields of oats and wheat, we came upon whole gangs of girls cutting down thistles. Each was armed with a kind of reaping-hook at the end of a pole. Very picturesque they looked at a distance in their short dresses of green, grey, pink, or blue. But the remarkable thing about them was this. They all wore bonnets with an immense flap behind, and in front a wonderful contrivance called “an ugly”—a sunshade which quite protected even their noses. And this was not all, for they had the whole of the jaws, chin, and cheeks tied up with immense handkerchiefs, just as the jaws of the dead are sometimes bound up.
I could not make it out. Riding on with my tricycle some distance ahead of the Wanderer, I came upon a gang of them—twenty-one in all—having a noontide rest, sitting and reclining on the flowery sward.
I could not help stopping to look at them. From the little I could see of their faces some were really pretty. But all these “thistle lassies” had their “uglies” on and their jaws tied up.
I stopped and looked, and I could no more help making the following remark than a lark can help singing.
“By everything that’s mysterious,” I said, “why have you got your jaws tied up? You’re not dead, and you can’t all have the toothache.”
I shall never forget as long as I live the chorus of laughing, the shrieks of laughter, that greeted this innocent little speech of mine. They did laugh, to be sure, and laughed and laughed, and punched each other with open palms, and laughed again, and some had to lie down and roll and laugh. Oh! you just start a Northumbrian lassie laughing, and she will keep it up for a time, I can tell you.
But at last a young thing of maybe sweet seventeen let the handkerchief down-drop from her face, detached herself from the squad, and came towards me.