Whether the money was ever paid history deponeth not. One thing however, is certain, and it is this, that not all the estates of all the Macnabs that ever existed would have tempted another embassy of the same three to Auchlyne.
The Laird o’ Macnab paid the debt of Nature (there was no shirking this creditor!) in the early part of the present century. His portrait—full length, and in Highland costume—painted by Raeburn, is still in the possession of the Breadalbane family.
CHAPTER XVIII
KIRKYARD HUMOUR
“God’s acre” should be about the last place in the world to which any mind blessed with an average sense of consistency, not to employ a stronger term, would turn with deliberate purpose in search of entertainment of a frivolous and amusing character. And yet, paradoxical as it may appear, the most serious of all events, solemn of all ordinances, and weird of all situations—death, burial, and the grave—have been the subjects of the most mirth-provoking puns and jokes; whilst some of the wittiest and most audaciously sarcastic of epigrammatic compositions are among those which have been discovered among the tombs in the silent cities of the dead. Like the dry and caustic humour of the Scottish beadles, to which, in essence and order they are nearly related, humorous and curious epitaphs no longer prevail amongst us. This is not to be regretted, for they have yielded to a more decorous, if perhaps less truthful and enlivening order of things. The wonder is that they ever obtained favour at all, here or elsewhere. I say elsewhere, because eccentricities of the kind under notice have not been peculiar to the kirkyards of the North. In England the punning and eccentric epitaph has prevailed to a greater extent even than in Scotland. Every representative collection of tombstone literature reveals this fact. Scotland alone, however, has produced an abundant crop. So much, indeed, as to form quite a distinct and interesting department of the humour of the country. The utter unpreparedness of the mind for the reception of humour in such a place as a kirkyard has occasionally, no doubt, helped what was incongruous to pass for humorous, as from the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step; but the following, which is still “to the fore,” though more than two hundred years old, and may be seen and read of all men in the Reid kirkyard, in the parish of Gairtney, in Annandale, is sufficiently ludicrous in itself to tickle the risible sensibilities of any rightly organized person independently of circumstance or association:—
“I, Jocky Bell o’ Brakenbrow, lyes under this stane,
Five of my awn sons laid it on my wame;
I liv’d aw my deyes, but sturt or strife
Was man o’ my meat, and master o’ my wife;
If you’ve done better in your time than I did in mine,