The following is about the only anecdote recorded of Fleeman which exhibits a mingling of the rogue with the fool:—He had been sent to Haddo House to fetch some geese thence to Udny Castle. Finding the task of driving them before him a very arduous one, by reason of their many perverse digressions from the public road, Jamie, when his patience was fairly exhausted, procured a straw rope, and twisting this about their necks, he took the double of it over his shoulder and walked swiftly on, dragging the geese after him, and never casting “one longing, lingering look behind.” On his arrival at Udny, he discovered to his horror, that the geese were all strangled and stone-dead. The breed was a peculiar one, and strict injunctions had been given to him to be careful in conducting the geese safely home. So his ingenuity, which never failed him, had to be drawn upon to devise a plan that would free him from disgrace. Accordingly, dragging his victims into the poultry yard, he stuffed their bills and throats with food, then boldly entered the castle.
“Well, Jamie, have you brought the geese?”
“Ay have I.”
“And are they safe?”
“Safe! I put them into the poultry yard, an’ they’re goble, goblin’ an’ eatin’ yonder as if they hadna seen meat this twalmonth. I only hope they haena chokit themsel’s afore noo!”
If Jamie Fleeman’s wits were “ravelled,” his heart was generally found sound and in the right place. His sympathies invariably went with the weak, the suffering, the poor, and the oppressed; and many anecdotes, not a few of them quite pathetic in their character, are on record, in illustration of this delightful side of his nature. Just one here:—There was a young fellow, a servant about a farmhouse where Fleeman sometimes stayed for a day or two at a time, who had seduced a poor girl in the neighbourhood, and added to his first fault by resolutely denying that he was the father of the child, and strenuously endeavouring to make it be believed that the girl’s reputation had always been of a very doubtful nature. Before the Kirk-Session he appeared again and again, where he declared his own innocence, and denounced the poor girl as a liar and worse, although, up to that time, she had really borne an unimpeachable character. With all these facts Jamie was, along with everybody else in the district, perfectly familiar, and he formed his own opinion regarding them. One evening at the farmhouse aforesaid, when the servants were gathered round the kitchen fire, and, with the fool in their midst, were playing off little jokes upon Jamie, in order to get amusement by his quick repartee, no one teased him more than he who had lately figured so conspicuously before the Kirk-Session.
“Man, Jamie,” said he, “ye’re sic a fool that I’ll wager ye that ye canna tell whether ye be your father’s son or your mither’s? Fat answer ha’e ye got to that? Just tell me?” And he burst into a loud fit of laughter, as if he had got the better of Jamie.
“Tell ye me first, then,” said Fleeman, gravely, “fat answer ye have to gie your Maker at the last day, when He asks you if ye didna break the lass’s character, and then swear that ye did nae sic thing. It will maybe then be asked of you if you can tell whether her boy be not your son as well as his mither’s; and, faith, I’m thinking it will puzzle you to mak’ it out that his being the son o’ the ane hinders him from being the son o’ the ither.”
Some of those present laughed, others looked as if they did not know what to do. But the upshot of the matter was that, in the course of a few days after, the man waited on the minister, declared himself mis-sworn, confessed he had purposely endeavoured to injure the girl’s character, and begged to be absolved from Church censure.
To an accident which befell him when following his avocation of cowherd, is to be ascribed the origin of a proverb very current in Buchan—“The truth aye tells best.” Fleeman had, in repelling the invasion of a corn-field by the cattle under his charge, had recourse to the unwarrantable and unherd-like expedient of throwing stones. One of his missiles, on an evil day and an hour of woe, broke the leg of a thriving two-year-old. Towards sunset, when the hour of driving the cattle home had arrived, Jamie was lingering by a dykeside, planning an excuse for the fractured limb of the unfortunate stot. “I’ll say,” he soliloquised, “that he was loupin’ a stank an’ fell an’ broke his leg. Na! that winna tell! I’ll say that the brown stallion gied him a kick and did it. That winna tell either! I’ll say that the park yett fell upon’t. Na! that winna tell! I’ll say—I’ll say—what will I say? Od, I’ll say that I flung a stane and did it! That’ll tell!”