“And, mother, maybe I’ll go with Shenac as far as The Eleventh. It’s a long time since I have seen Mary Matheson, and I’ll be home before dark.”
“Well, well, go surely, if you like,” said her mother; “and you might speak to McLean about the flannel, and bespeak McCallum the tailor to come as soon as he can to make the lads’ clothes; and you might ask about the shoes.”
“Yes, mother, I’ll mind them all. I’ll just speak to Hamish first, and then I’ll away.”
Hamish was in the garden digging and smoothing the ground where their summer’s potatoes had grown, because he had nothing else to do, he said, and it would be so much done before the spring. Shenac seated herself on the fence, and began pulling, one by one, the brown oak leaves that hung low over it. There was no gate to the garden. It was doubtful whether a gate could have been made with sufficient strength, or fastened with sufficient ingenuity, to prevent the incursions of the pigs and calves, which, now that the fields were clear from grain, were permitted to wander over them at their will. So the garden was entered by a sort of stile—a board was placed with one end on the ground, and the other on the middle rail of the fence—and it was on this that Shenac sat down.
“Hamish,” she said after a little, “what do you think of my asking John Firinn to plough the land for the wheat—and to sow it too, for that matter?”
“I don’t think you had better call him by that name, if you want him to do you a favour,” said Hamish, laughing. “But why ask John Firinn of all the folk in the world?”
(“Firinn” is the Gaelic name for “truth,” and it was added to the name of one of the many John McDonalds of the neighbourhood; not, I am sorry to say, because he always spoke the truth, but because he did not.)
Shenac laughed.
“No; it’s not likely. But I’m doing it for him because his wife has been sick all the summer, and has not a thread of her wool spun yet, and I am going to change work with them.”
“But, Shenac,” said Hamish gravely, “does our mother know? I am sure she will think you have enough to do at home, without going to spin at John Firinn’s.”