And for some reason Margaret, the Flower of Nourn, dropped her grain dish and kissed her guest.
Now there is little to be telling when little things only are in the memory, and yet the days with little to be remembering are the happy days, that go past quickly like youth, and leave but vague memories of sunshine and laughter—of nights, and song, and dance. And there were great nights of happiness, for in these days the folk had the time to be knowing one the other, and neighbourly. And maybe in an evening there would be gathered at Dan's place all the old friends of his youth. You would be seeing Ronald McKinnon and Mirren, sitting in the circle round the fire, thrang at the knitting—both man and wife—kemping as they called it: that is, each would tie a knot in the worsted and make a race of it, who would be finished first. And Jock McGilp too would be there, standing off and on, between the stories of his wild seafaring days and the ghost stories of his youth; and Robin McKelvie and his sister that met us on the shore head of the isle that night the Red Laird passed; and there was no Red Roland in her mind these days, for she had weans to her oxter. And maybe, perched on a table like a heathen god, the tailor would be working; and if there were young lassies with their lads, ye would have the fiddle going, and the hoochin' and the dancing.
And even in the cottars' houses the good-wife would have a meal on such a night, and it would be pork and greens, or herring and potatoes; and then when it was bedtime in the morning, the ceilidhers would take the road, with maybe a piper at the head of them, and it would be at another house they would be meeting on the next night. Wae's me, these days are fast going, and there are bolts and bars on the doors now. The story of a winter's ceilidhing would be a great book for fine stories.
And into a meeting of this kind, when the evening was well on, came Hugh McBride, and there was the great scraping of chairs and stools back from the fire, and Belle would have been putting a fire in a better room; but Dan had been too long in the field for these capers, for all that Hugh would be Laird and very grand above common folk. Dan waved him to a chair in his polite way, and made him very welcome. But Hugh was not seeing chairs that night, much less sitting quietly. There was a sparkle in his eye and a flush on his cheeks, and his smile was for everybody, and when the lave of the folk were on the road he told us the news.
"Mistress Helen will be having me," says he. "Och, I will have been singing every love-song I was remembering since I left the gate at Scaurdale."
And we made a great "to-do" about it, and we were not any the better maybe for what we drank to his luck, and the lass's luck; and on the hill-road home he was at the singing again.
"She is a fine lass, Hamish—my wife that will be; is she no'?"
"A fine lass."
"For a while—a long while the night,—it was in my mind that she would not be caring to have me, for she has the wale of brisk Ayrshire lads to pick from, and she swithered long."
"'We were babies together,' says she, 'in your mother's house?'