But Mrs. Brunton was immoveable in this matter, so they had to submit.
“AULD LANGSYNE.”
The time, however, was not lost: David showed Bell the cows, the live stock, and the steading. They had but half finished the survey of the garden when the Knowe Park contingent came up; they joined it, and were convoyed into the house in a style quite to Mrs. Brunton’s mind. The infar-cake was duly broken over Bell’s head, and the usual doggrel rhyme repeated:
“Welcome to your ain fireside—
Health and wealth attend the bride!
Wanters noo your true weird make—
Joes are spaed by th’ infar-cake.”
When the young lads of the village gathered round the manse to give David and Bell a kindly but rough token of their respect, they were sadly disappointed to find that they were too late. This spoiling of their expected “ploy” [innocent frolic] irritated them, and the more thoughtless determined to go to Blackbrae and play some tricks on David, or, as the ringleaders expressed it, “they wad gi’e him’t for this.” They returned to the village to get a creel, a fishwife’s basket, with which to “creel” David,—a custom now unknown, but common forty years ago.
In my earlier days I have witnessed very rude conduct when the rougher and “drouthy” neighbours got the young husband into a creel, as soon as he appeared outside on the day after the marriage, and roughly jostled him until his wife came out, kissed him, and produced the “bottle.” Whilst this custom was dying out such extremes were not practised. The husband got the creel put on his back, with some weight in it (sometimes a boy, sometimes a pig, but oftener a few stones), and the whisky was greedily drained by the creelers to “your very good health,” but the wife did not need to appear.
Dan chanced to overhear some of the more fiery spirits concocting schemes to annoy his friends at Blackbrae. He went home as quickly as he could, “loosed” his ferocious, bandy-legged, ugly (not in Dan’s eyes, for he thought him a beauty, just a perfect picture) bull-dog “Burke,” took a short cut through the fields, carrying with him a huge “flail” used for threshing corn, and sat down on the “loupin’-on stane”—a stone at the side of Blackbrae farm-yard gate used when mounting on horseback.