“Hoo lang have I been dead?”
“A fortnicht.”
“An’ are ye dead, too?”
“Yes.”
“Hoo lang have you been dead?”
“Three weeks.”
“Then,” said Tam, without a tremour in his voice, “you’ll be better acquaint here aboot than me: there’s a shillin’, skirt awa’ roond an’ see if ye can get hauf a mutchkin, for I’m as dry’s a wooden leg.”
I have remarked on how strongly the practice of dram-drinking had established itself in the social life of Scotland. It is the sore spot in our national character—a distinct characteristic (happily on the wane)—and the inducements to participation have been often novel and therefore humorous. Well-to-do individuals long ago frequently gave instructions to their relatives likely to survive them to be sure and have plenty of whisky at their funerals. A Montrose tradesman, feeling the near approach of his dissolution, signalled his wife to his bedside and very gravely said, “Ye’ll get in a bottle o’ whisky, Mary, for there’s to be sad cheenge here this nicht.”
The association of the “dram” with our marriage festivities has been happily hit off by Robert Buchanan in “The Wedding of Shon MacLean,” where “every piper was fou—twenty pipers together;” but surely the stupidity, the folly, the humour of dram-drinking to excess was never better illustrated than by Burns in the tale of “Tam o’ Shanter.” To have attributed such hair-lifting experiences to any sober Carrick farmer, as he “frae Ayr a’e nicht did canter,” would have been absurd, and the author knew it. Such a phantasmagoria of “warlocks and witches in a dance” could be patent only to the heated imagination of a “bletherin’, blusterin’, drunken blellum,” such as the poet has represented his hero to have been.