“No!” shouted the foreman.
“Will ye no tak’ a look o’ the gudes, sir?” inquired Saunders.
“No, not at all; I have not time. Take them away.”
“Ye’ll maybe find them worth your while; and I dootna but ye’ll buy,” said Saunders, as he coolly proceeded to untie his pack.
“Go away, go away!” was reiterated half a dozen times with great impatience, but the persevering Scotsman still persisted.
“Get along, you old Scotch fool,” cried the foreman, completely out of temper, as he pushed the already exposed contents of the pack off the counter. “Get along!”
Saunders looked up in the individual’s face with a wide mouth and enlarged pair of eyes, then looked down to his estate that lay scattered among his feet, looked up again, and exclaimed—“And will ye no buy ocht? But ye dinna ken, for ye haena seen the gudes,” and so saying he proceeded to replace them on the counter.
“Get out of the shop, sir!” was the peremptory and angry command which followed this third appeal.
Saunders, with great gravity and self-possession, said—“Are ye in earnest, freend?”
“Yes, certainly,” was the reply, which was succeeded by an unequivocal proof of sincerity on the part of the person who made it, when he picked up Saunders’s bonnet and whirled it into the street. The cool Scotsman stalked deliberately and gravely in quest of his Kilmarnock headgear, and after giving it two or three hearty slaps upon the wall outside the door, he re-entered very composedly, wringing the muddy moisture out of it, looked over to the person who had served him so meanly, and said, with a genuine Scotch smile—“Man, yon was an ill-faured turn; you’ll surely tak’ a look o’ the gudes noo?”