“I'm not thinking of myself,” said he, always glooming at the platter with his dark, wild Hielan' eye. “I'm not thinking of myself,” said he, “but it's something by way of an insult to you, that had to complain of Sunday's haddocks.”
“Oh, as to them,” quo' I, “they did brawly for me; 'twas you put your share in your pocket and threw it away on the Green. Besides the scones are not so bad as they look”—I broke one and ate; “they're owre good at least for a hungry man like me to send back where they came from.”
His face got red. “What's that rubbish about the haddocks and the Green?” said he. “You left me at my breakfast when you went to the Ram's Horn Kirk.”
“And that's true, Jock,” said I; “but I think I have made no' so bad a guess. You were feared to affront the landlady by leaving her ancient fish on the ashet, and you egged me on to do the grumbling.”
“Well, it's as sure as death, Paul,” said he shamefacedly, “I hate to vex a woman. And you're a thought wrong in your guess”—he laughed at his own humour as he said it—“for when you were gone to your kirk I transferred my share of the stinking fish to your empty plate.”
He jouked his head, but scarcely quick enough, for my Sallust caught him on the ear. He replied with a volume of Buchanan the historian, the man I like because he skelped the Lord's anointed, James the First, and for a time there was war in Lucky Grant's parlour room, till I threw him into the recess bed snibbed the door, and went abroad into the street leaving my room-fellow for once to utter his own complaints.
I went out with the itch of battle on me, and that was the consequence of a woman's havering while scones burned, and likewise my undoing, for the High Street when I came to it was in the yeasty ferment of encountering hosts, their cries calling poor foolish Paul Greig like a trumpet.
It had been a night and morning of snow, though I and Mackellar, so high in Lucky Grant's chamber in Crombie's Land, had not suspected it. The dull drab streets, with their crazy, corbelled gable-ends, had been transformed by a silent miracle of heaven into something new and clean; where noisome gutters were wont to brim with slops there was the napkin of the Lord.
For ordinary I hated this town of my banishment; hated its tun-bellied Virginian merchants, so constantly airing themselves upon the Tontine piazza and seeming to suffer from prosperity as from a disease; and felt no great love of its women—always so much the madame to a drab-coated lad from the moorlands; suffered from its greed and stifled with the stinks of it. “Gardyloo! Gardyloo! Gardyloo!” Faith! I hear that evening slogan yet, and see the daunderers on the Rottenrow skurry like rats into the closes to escape the cascades from the attic windows. And while I think I loved learning (when it was not too ill to come by), and was doing not so bad in my Humanities, the carven gateway of the college in my two sessions of a scholar's fare never but scowled upon me as I entered.
But the snow that morning made of the city a place wherein it was good to be young, warm-clad, and hardy. It silenced the customary traffic of the street, it gave the morning bells a song of fairydom and the valleys of dream; up by-ordinary tall and clean-cut rose the crow-stepped walls, the chimney heads, and steeples, and I clean forgot my constant fancy for the hill of Ballageich and the heather all about it. And war raged. The students faced 'prentice lads and the journeymen of the crafts with volleys of snowballs; the merchants in the little booths ran out tremulous and vainly cried the watch. Charge was made and counter-charge; the air was thick with missiles, and close at hand the silver bells had their merry sweet chime high over the city of my banishment drowned by the voices taunting and defiant.