“Faith! 'tis a poor enough home-coming, without wife or bairn to meet one,” said he, as he pushed in the door.
“Wife! wife!” he cried ben among the peat-reek, “there's never a stot, but here's the cockade for the little one!”
A FINE PAIR OF SHOES
THE beginnings of things are to be well considered—we have all a little of that art; but to end well and wisely is the gift of few. Hunters and herds on the corri and the hill—they are at the simple end of life, and ken the need for the task complete. The stag must be gralloched ere ye brag of him, the drove must be at the market ere ye say anything of the honesty of the glens ye pass through.
And what I like best about our own Gaels is their habit of bringing the work of a day or the work of a lifetime to what (in their own notions) is an end round and polished.
When our women die, they do it with something of a daintiness. Their dead-clothes are in the awmrie; I have seen them with the cakes toasted and the board set for their funerals. Travelling wide on unfriendly foreign roads, living by sword or wit, you know that our men, the poorest among them, with an empty sporran, kept the buttons of their duds of good silver, to pay, if need be, for something more than a gangrel's burial. I like to think of him in story who, at his end in bed, made the folk trick him out in gallant style with tartan, targe, brogue, and bonnet, and the sword in his hand.
“A Gaelic gentleman,” said he, “should come to his journey's end somewhat snod and well-put-on.” And his son played “Cha till mi tuilidh” (“I return no more”) on the bag-pipe by his firm command.
It is not even in this unco undertaking of Death that the polish must be put on the task (though poor's the creature who dies clumsily); it should be the same with every task of a day.