“Your old political twists, William,” said I, as I recollected a curious theory he sported everywhere, and was rather mad upon.
“Oh, but I don’t hate James for opposing me in that. I rather like him the better for it. We get fun out of it.”
“The more reason,” said I, “for you to give up your ill-natured fancy. Stab you!—why, man, James Imrie is so inoffensive a creature, that, though a flesher’s runner, he wouldn’t flap a fly that blows his beef, unless it were a very tempting bluebottle.”
“I believe it,” said he, looking a little more calm; “and I will try to forget the face. I will be better after my breakfast.”
So I left William to his morning meal, suspecting that there would be a dram before it, thinking too of the strange fancy that had taken possession of him, but never dreaming that anything would come of it. It was sometime afterwards that the thread of the story again recurred to my mind, and what I have now to relate was derived from a conversation I had with Wright himself at a time when he was likely to speak the truth. I cannot answer for every word of the conversation I am to report, but I have little doubt that the substance comes as near the thing as other recitals of the same kind, recorded a considerable time after they have occurred.
It appeared that James Imrie, according to his old habit, and without knowing anything of William’s dream, had left his house in Skinner’s Close, and gone to his friend’s, for the purpose of having a crack and a spark. William, who was at the time busy with a job of cobbling which he had promised to finish that night, received his friend with all his usual warmth, but, what was strange enough, without saying a word of his dream. James sat at a little side-table near William’s stool, and some whisky was produced, according to their old fashion; for the shoemaker, like other political cobblers, liked nothing better than to spin his politics and take his dram while he was plying his awl and rosin-end. So scarcely had the first glass been swallowed, when William got upon his hobby—“The five acres and the thousand pounds” doctrine as he used to call it, and which the reader will understand as the conversation progresses. Poor James was no great adept at the sublime mystery that, like Fourier’s, was to regenerate the world, and make every snob and flesher’s runner as happy as the denizens of Paradise; and therefore, with his tardy thoughts and slow Scotch pronunciation, was no match for his book-read and voluble antagonist; but he was a good “butt,” and that was all probably that Wright cared for—his sole ambition being to speak and to be heard speaking by any one, however unable to understand the extent of his learning.
“There now,” began William, “I have been reading in the Scotsman to-day that the Duke of Buccleuch has a thousand a-day. Good Lord! just think, if all the land possessed by this one man, made of clay no finer than the potter’s, and maybe not so well turned, was divided into ploughgates, how many poor people would be lairds, and rendered happy.”
“But if we were a’ lairds,” drawled James, “wha wad mak’ the shoon and rin wi’ the beef?”
“They would make their own shoes out of their own leather, and rear their own beef,” was the triumphant reply. “Then, people say I’m for French equality. I’m not. The idiots don’t understand the ‘five acres and thousand pounds’ doctrine. No man should have more than that quantity of land, or that sum of money. The overplus should be taken from him and divided.”
“It looks weel,” replied James, with a good-natured smile; “but how would it work? It puts me in mind o’ Laird Gilmour’s plan wi’ his snuff. ‘Let every prudent man ken,’ said he, ‘that there’s twa hundred pinches in half an unce; and let him keep count as he taks every pinch, and his nose will never cheat him, and he’ll never cheat his nose.’ I’ve tried it, but I aye lost count.”