“That has been in my ain mind,” said his wife; “but I never liked to say it. But he’s no’ the waur o’ being like baith.”
Again: There lived in the same common passage, and opposite to William Thorburn’s door, an old soldier, a pensioner. He was a bachelor, and by no means disposed to hold much intercourse with his neighbours. The noise of the children was obnoxious to him. He maintained that “an hour’s drill every day would alone make them tolerable. Obedience to authority; right about, march! That’s the thing,” the Corporal would say to some father of a numerous family in the “close,” as he flourished his stick with a smile rather than a growl. Jeanie pronounced him to be “a selfish body.” Thorburn had more than once tried to cultivate acquaintance with him, as they were constantly brought into outward contact. But the Corporal was a Tory, and more than suspected the smith of holding “Radical” sentiments. To defend things as they were was a point of honour with the pensioner—a religion. Any dislike to the Government seemed a slight upon the army, and therefore upon himself. Thorburn at last avoided him, and pronounced him proud and ignorant. But one day “wee Davie” found his way into his house, and putting his hands on his knees as he smoked his pipe at the fireside, looked up to his face. The old soldier was arrested by the beauty of the child, and took him on his knee. To his surprise, Davie did not scream; and when his mother soon followed in search of her boy, and made many apologies for his “impudence,” as she called it, the Corporal maintained that he was a jewel, a perfect gentleman, and dubbed him “the Captain.”
Next day, tapping at Thorburn’s door, the Corporal gracefully presented a toy in the shape of a small sword and drum for his young hero. That night he smoked his pipe at the smith’s fireside, and told such stories of his battles as fired the smith’s enthusiasm, called forth his praises, and, what was more substantial, a most comfortable tea by Jeanie, which clinched their friendly intercourse. He and “the Captain” became constant associates, and many a loud laugh might be heard from the Corporal’s room as he played with the boy, and educated his genius. “He makes me young again, does the Captain!” remarked the Corporal to his mother.
Mrs. Fergusson, another neighbour, was also drawn into the same net by “wee Davie.” She was a fussy, gossiping woman, noisy and disagreeable. She found Jeanie uncongenial, who “kept herself to herself,” instead of giving away some of her good self to her neighbour, and thus taking some of her neighbour’s bad self out of her. But her youngest child became seriously ill, and Jeanie thought, “If Davie was ill I would like a neighbour to speir for him,” and so she went upstairs to visit Mrs. Fergusson, and begged pardon, but “wished to know how Mary was?” and Mrs. Fergusson was bowed down with sorrow, and thanked her, and bid her “to come ben.” And Jeanie did so, and spoke kindly to the child, and told her, moreover, what pleasure it would give her to nurse her baby occasionally; and she invited the younger children to come down to her house and play with “wee Davie,” and thus keep the sick one quiet; and she helped also to cook some nutritive drinks, and got nice milk from her father for the sick one, and often excused herself for apparent meddling by saying, “When one has a bairn o’ their ain, they canna but feel for other folk’s bairns.”
Mrs. Fergusson’s heart became subdued, softened, and friendly, and she said, “We took it as extraordinar’ kind in Mrs. Thorburn to do as she has done. It is a blessing to have sic a neighbour.”
But it was “wee Davie” did it.
The street in which the smith lived was as uninteresting as any could be. A description of its outs and ins would have made a “social science” meeting shudder. Beauty or even neatness it had not. Every “close” or “entry” in it looked like a sepulchre. The back courts were a huddled confusion of outhouses; strings of linens drying; stray dogs searching for food; pigeons similarly employed with more apparent success and satisfaction; and cats creeping about; with crowds of children, laughing, shouting, and muddy to the eyes, acting with intense glee the great dramas of life, marriages, battles, deaths, and burials, with castle-building and extensive farming and commercial operations. But everywhere smoke, mud, wet, and an utterly uncomfortable look. And so long as we in Scotland have a western ocean to afford an unlimited supply of water, and western mountains to condense it as it passes in the blue air over their summits, and western winds to waft it to our cities, and so long as it will pour down, and be welcomed by smoke above and earth below—then consequently so long we shall find it difficult to be “neat and tidy about the doors,” or to transport the cleanliness of England into our streets and lanes. But, in spite of all this, how many cheerful homes, with bright fires and nice furniture, and rows of books, and intelligent, sober, happy men and women, with healthy, nice children, are everywhere to be found in those very streets, that seem to the eye of those who have never penetrated farther than their outside, to be “dreadful-looking places;” and who imagine that all their inhabitants must be like pigs in pigstyes, steeped in wretchedness and whisky; and infer that every ignorant and filthy and drunken Irish brawler and labourer is a fair type of the whole of our artisans.
There is, I begin to suspect, a vast deal of exaggerated nonsense written about the working classes. Be that as it may, I feel pretty certain of this, that there is no country on earth in which the skilled and well-conducted artisan can get so much for his money, socially, physically, intellectually, and morally, as in our own Britain, and none in which there are to be found so many artisans who take advantage of these benefits. But for the ignorant and ill-disposed, the idle and the drunken, there is no country where their degradation is more rapid, and their ruin more sure. The former can easily rise above the mud, and breathe a free and happy atmosphere; but if he falls into it, it is likely he will be sooner smothered and buried than anywhere else on earth.
A happier home could hardly be found than William Thorburn’s, smith, as he sat, after coming home from his work, at the fireside, reading his newspaper, or some book of weightier literature, Jeanie sewing opposite to him, and, as it often happened, both absorbed occasionally in the rays of that bright light, “wee Davie,” which filled their dwelling, and the whole world, to their eyes; or listened to the grand concert of his happy voice, which mingled with their busy work and silent thoughts, giving harmony to all. How much was done for his sake! He was the most sensible, efficient, and thoroughly philosophical missionary of social science in all its departments who could enter that house.