“Wall, wall, I spoze like as not he did own a claymore, Josiah Allen, and I dare say it wuz a pretty hefty one.” And then I turned the subject off onto Robert Burns, and bagpipes, and sech.
Truly there is a time for pardners to stand their ground, and a time for ’em to gin in. When they see blood-vessels are on the pint of bustin’ and pardners are chokin’ with rage—gin in to ’em if you can, and keep your principles.
I allers foller this receipt, and it has bore me on triumphant.
Truly great is the mystery of pardners.
Wall, Josiah got real sentimental a-talkin’ about Wallace’s first wife, Marion, and his second wife, Helen Mar. “You know,” sez Josiah, “Helen said in them last hours—‘My life must expire with his.’”
And I sez, “Wall, it did at jest about the same time—she died of a broken heart,” sez I, bein’ willin’ to talk kind o’ sentimental with him, and soothe him down.
“Yes,” sez Josiah, “and don’t you remember what Bothwell said ‘as he raised her clay-cold face from Wallace’s coffin’—
“‘They loved in their lives, and in their deaths they shall not be divided’?”
Josiah was dretful sentimental at them reminescences, but he gradually chirked up agin, and by the time we come in sight of that tower of William Wallace’s, in Ayr, more’n a hundred feet high, Josiah’s sperits riz up almost as high as that tower.
Ayr is the seen of some of the most thrillin’ events of Wallace’s life. Here he would sally out aginst his enemies—here he wuz took by ’em and imprisoned. Here Robert Bruce and his troops made it their headquarters for a spell, and so did Cromwell and his army.