Ah, poor body! No doubt she gave expression to a thought that had for some time been having a prominent place in her mind. As Tom Moore reminds us, in the midst of a serious poem, “We must all dine,” and if the bread-winner has been laid aside for a time, the means of subsistence are sometimes difficult to obtain, and when “supply” is wholly cut off, a decrease in “demand” is sometimes not unwelcome.
A splendid instance of the matter-of-fact view of things celestial frequently taken by the Scotch mind is in that story which Dean Ramsay tells of the old woman who was dying at Hawick. In this Border seat of tweed manufacture the people wear wooden-soled boots—clogs—which make a clanking noise on the pavement. Several friends stood by the bedside of the dying person, and one of them said to her—
“Weel, Jenny, ye’re deein’; but ye’ve done the richt gaet here, an’ ye’ll gang to heaven; an’ when ye gang there, should you see ony o’ oor fouk, ye micht tell them that we’re a’ weel.”
“Ou,” said Jenny half-heartedly, “gin I see them I’se tell them; but ye maunna expect that I’m to be gaun clank, clankin’ about through heaven lookin’ for your fouk.”
Of all the stories of this class, however, the following death-bed conversation between a husband and wife affords perhaps the very best specimen of the dry humour peculiar to Scotch folk:—An old shoemaker in Glasgow was sitting by the bedside of his wife, who was dying. Taking her husband by the hand, the old woman said, “Weel, John, we’re to pairt. I hae been a gude wife to you, John.”
“Oh, middlin’, middlin’, Jenny,” said John, not disposed to commit himself wholly.
“Ay, I’ve been a gude wife to you, John,” says she, “an’ ye maun promise to bury me in the auld kirkyard at Stra’von, beside my ain kith and kin, for I couldna rest in peace among unoo fouk, in the dirt an’ smoke o’ Gleska’.”
“Weel, weel, Jenny, my woman,” said John, soothingly, “I’ll humour ye thus far. We’ll pit ye in the Gorbals first, an’ gin ye dinna lie quiet there, we’ll tak’ ye to Stra’von syne.”
And yet there is on record a retort of a Scotch beadle, which is almost equally moving. Saunders was a victim to chronic asthma, and one day, whilst in the act of opening a grave, was seized with a violent fit of coughing. The minister, towards whom Saunders bore little affection, at the same time entering the kirkyard, came up to the old man as he was leaning over his spade wiping the tears from his eyes, and said, “That’s a very bad cough you’ve got, Saunders.”
“Ay, it’s no very gude,” was the dry response, “but there’s a hantle fouk lyin’ round aboot ye that wud be gey glad o’t.”