"Why dinna ye ask her, Jamie?"
"Janet," says Jamie, without accompanying his words with the slightest chalorous movement, "wad ye be that woman I was speakin' of?"
"If I died before you, Jamie, I wad like your han' to close my een."
The engagement was completed with a kiss to seal the compact.
The Scot, in his quality of a man of action, talks little; all the less, perhaps, because he knows that he will have to give an account of every idle word in the Last Day.
He has reduced conversation to its simplest expression. Sometimes even he will restrain himself, much to the despair of foreigners, so far as to only pronounce the accentuated syllable of each word. What do I say? The syllable? He will often sound but the vowel of that syllable.
Here is a specimen of Scotch conversation, given by Dr. Ramsay:
A Scot, feeling the warp of a plaid hanging at a tailor's door, enquires:
"Oo?" (Wool?)