Speaking of necessity and mercy. It is Dr. Guthrie also, I think, who tells of a maid-servant who refused to feed the cows on the Sabbath, although she was willing to milk them. The explanation being, “The cows canna milk themsel’s, so to milk them is a clear work o’ necessity, but let them out to the fields and they’ll feed themsel’s weel enough.” And speaking of milking reminds me of a good country story. It is a native of Glenisla, in Forfarshire, and belongs to the time when Matthew Henry’s famous Bible Commentary was the apple of every leal Scotsman’s eye. One Geordie Scott, thereaway, was so fain to possess a copy of “Matthew Henry,” as this Bible was long familiarly termed, that he suggested to his wife (the two lived alone together) that they might sell the cow and purchase one with the price she would realise. The wife demurred at first, but latterly consented, with one proviso—namely, that Geordie would be willing to take “treacle ale” to his porridge every morning. This the good man at once agreed to. So crummie departed, and “Matthew Henry” arrived. A few weeks passed, and the big ha’ Bible gave great delight, but the “treacle ale” was like to turn Geordie’s stamach a’thegither.
“Dod, wife,” said he one morning, “I doot that treacle ale’s no gaun to do wi’ me, we’ll need to try an’ get a wee drap milk to the parritch. What do ye think?”
Janet had been missing her troke with the cow, and was rueing that she had consented to the “niffer.”
“’Deed, gudeman,” says she, “a bargain’s a bargain. An’ gin ye will hae milk, an’ winna want it, ye maun just gang an’ milk ‘Matthew Henry.’”
Your rural Scot is reflective and argumentative to a degree.
“Dinna tell me,” said a sapient Forfarshire laird of the old school, “dinna tell me that the earth’s shaped like an orange, an’ that it whirls roond aboot ilka twenty-four ’oors. It’s a’ nonsense. The Seidlaw Hills lie to the North and the Tay to the Sooth at nicht when I gang to my bed; i’ the mornin’ when I rise I find them the same; an’ that’s gude proof that the earth disna turn roond. I’ll tell ye what it is—an’ I speak wi’ authority of ane wha’s gi’en the maitter a deal o’ thocht—the earth’s spread oot just like a muckle barley scone, in which the Howe o’ Strathmore represents a knuckle mark.”
Reflective, I said. Very! And the ordinary Scotch farmer’s love of gain is proverbial. Life in his eyes is valuable chiefly as a season in which to make money. Thus, not very long ago, while about half a dozen farmers were returning home by train from the Perth weekly market, they talked about how this friend and that friend was in his health; and about some others who had died recently, and how much money each of them must have left.
“Ay, but men dinna live nearly sae lang nooadays as they did in the Bible times!” remarked one, with a heavy sigh.
“Eh, man, na,” broke in another, who had hitherto not spoken. “An’ I was just thinkin’ there to mysel’ a minute syne, that Methuselah must have been worth a power o’ money when he dee’d, if he was onything o’ a savin’ kind o’ a man ava.”