He groaned hopelessly.
“A rotten tale, Paul, my lad,” said he, never looking me in the face; “I rue the day I was mixed up in that affair.”
“But it was a good story so far as it went, no further gone than Wednesday last,” I protested.
He laughed at that, and for half an hour he put off the new man of my mother's bidding, and we were on the old naughty footing again. He concluded by bequeathing to me for the twentieth time the brass-bound chest, and its contents that we had never seen nor could guess the nature of. But now for the first time he let me know what I might expect there.
“It's not what Quentin might consider much,” said he, “for there's not a guelder of money in it, no, nor so little as a groat, for as the world's divided ye can't have both the money and the dance, and I was aye the fellow for the dance. There's scarcely anything in it, Paul, but the trash—ahem!—that is the very fitting reward of a life like mine.”
“And still and on, uncle,” said I, “it is a very good tale about the pock-marked man.”
“Ah! You're there, Greig!” cried the rogue, laughing till his hoast came to nigh choke him. “Well, the kist's yours, anyway, such as it is; and there's but one thing in it—to be strict, a pair—that I set any store by as worth leaving to my nephew.”
“It ought to be spurs,” said I, “to drive me out of this lamentable countryside and to where a fellow might be doing something worth while.”
“Eh!” he cried, “you're no' so far off it, for it's a pair of shoes.”
“A pair of shoes!” I repeated, half inclined to think that Uncle Andrew was doited at last.