The torrent of logic was over, and I said humbly that I would take the whole loaf.
"Verra weel, mam," she responded more affably, "thank you kindly; no, I couldna tak' it in hand to sell six pennyworth of that ginger cake and let one and sixpence worth gae dry in the bakery—A beautiful day, mam! Won'erful blest in weather ye are! Let me open your umbrella for you, mam!"
* * * * *
David Robb is the weaver of Pettybaw. All day long he sits at his old-fashioned hand-loom, which, like the fruit of his toil and the dear old graybeard himself, belongs to a day that is past and gone.
He might have work enough to keep an apprentice busy, but where would he find a lad sufficiently behind the times to learn a humble trade now banished to the limbo of superseded, almost forgotten things?
His home is but a poor place, but the rough room in which he works is big enough to hold a deal of sweet content. It is cheery enough, too, to attract the Pettybaw weans, who steal in on wet days and sit on the floor playing with the thrums, or with bits of colored ravelings. Sometimes when they have proved themselves wise and prudent little virgins, they are even allowed to touch the hanks of pink and yellow and blue yarn that lie in rainbow-hued confusion on the long deal table.
All this time the "heddles" go up and down, up and down, with their ceaseless clatter, and David throws the shuttle back and forth as he weaves his old-fashioned winseys.
We have grown to be good friends, David and I, and I have been permitted the signal honor of painting him at his work.
The loom stands by an eastern window, and the rare Pettybaw sunshine filters through the branches of a tree, shines upon the dusty window-panes, and throws a halo round David's head that he well deserves and little suspects. In my foreground sit Meg and Jean and Elspeth playing with thrums and wearing the fruit of David's loom in their gingham frocks. David himself sits on his wooden bench behind the maze of cords that form the "loom harness."
The snows of seventy winters powder his hair and beard. His spectacles are often pushed back on his kindly brow, but no glass could wholly obscure the clear integrity and steadfast purity of his eyes; and as for his smile I have not the art to paint that! It holds in solution so many sweet though humble virtues of patience, temperance, self-denial, honest endeavor, that my brush falters in the attempt to fix the radiant whole upon the canvas. Fashions come and go, modern improvements transform the arts and trades, manual skill gives way to the cunning of the machine, but old David Robb, after more than fifty years of toil, still sits at his hand-loom and weaves his winseys for the Pettybaw bairnies.