“I am very sorry for you,” said Rosamond; “my father is like you, he cannot move; but he does not like people to ask him how he is.”
“Ay, ay, ye hae a father like me? Poor gentleman, I’m sure he has my compassion,” said Rankin, “especially if he has no favourite purshoot like mine that makes the time pass.”
“Well, let us see your favourite purshoot,” said Eddy; “let us see them. They are great fun, the little beasts.”
“I am no reduced to that stage of intelligence,” said the gamekeeper, “to call the breeding o’ dowgs a purshoot. I just leave that to nature. What I really am, and I’m proud o’t, is an antiquary. There’s no many things ye can bring to me in the way of antiquities that would puzzle me. I’ve seen when half o’ this,” he laid his hand on a paper on the bed, “was my writing—whiles questions and whiles answers. It’s maybe no a profitable kind of study. I make nothing by it in the way of money; but it’s real entertaining. I’m just as pleased when a number comes in with me, answering a’ the scholars and putting them right, or them answering me and putting me right, as if it was so much siller in my pooch.”
“Oh ay,” said his wife, in the background, “you have had an awfu’ troke with the papers, John Rankin; but it would have sert ye muckle better if you had written something that would be of use, and got a little by it. Good siller is out o’ place in nobody’s pooch.”
“Do you mean to say that you—write for the papers?” said Rosamond.
“That do I, my bonny leddy; and ye should just recommend a study like mine to your father, poor gentleman. You’ll see many a thing from me there. I’m Ros-beg, that’s the name I took; which means the little Ros, just as Rosmore means the muckle Ros, and Ben Ros the hill. I’m grand upon Hieland antiquities, and considered one o’ the first authorities. Ye’ll see, ye’ll see,” said Rankin, waving his hand as he held out the paper to his visitor. It was a very well-known paper, one in which a great many questions are put and answered. The reader will not need to be told its highly respectable name.
“Is it you that has written all this about some bard—Donald—I can’t say his name? And there’s an answer from Ben Cruachan, and one from Mr. Davies, and G. Johnson—oh, Eddy! St. Chad’s, Cambridge!”
“I say,” Eddy had begun, “hand us out some of the doggies, and don’t talk;” but when he saw the page which Rosamond held out to him, he laughed out till the cottage rang. “Oh ho,” he said, “Johnson! Here is a lark! Johnson! Now we’ll have some fun. I say, gamekeeper! Johnson’s here.”
“What is your will, sir?” said Rankin, with great dignity. The purveyor of dogs could take a joke, but not the contributor to Notes and Queries. In the latter capacity, John Rankin veiled his bonnet to none.