"Tak' the pot oot an' clean it. Gie the scrapins' to the dogs!" ordered
Mistress MacWalter.
Kit obeyed. Tyke and Tweed followed with their tails over their backs. The white wastes glimmered in the grey of the morning. It was rosy where the sun was going to rise behind the great ridge of Ben Arrow, which looked, smoothly covered with snow as it was, exactly like a gigantic turnip-pit. At the back of the milkhouse Kit set down the pot, and with a horn spoon which he took from his pocket he shared the scraping of the pot equally into three parts, dividing it mathematically by lines drawn up from the bottom. It was a good big pot, and there was a good deal of scrapings, which was lucky for both Tweed and Tyke, as well as good for Kit Kennedy.
Now, this is the way that Kit Kennedy—that kinless loon, without father or mother—won his breakfast.
He had hardly finished and licked his spoon, the dogs sitting on their haunches and watching every rise and fall of the horn, when a well-known voice shrilled through the air—
"Kit Kennedy, ye lazy, ungrateful hound, come ben to the "Buik." Ye are no better than the beasts that perish, regairdless baith o' God and man!"
So Kit Kennedy cheerfully went in to prayers and thanksgiving, thinking himself not ill off. He had had his breakfast.
And Tweed and Tyke, the beasts that perish, put their noses into the porridge-pot to see if Kit Kennedy had left anything. There was not so much as a single grain of meal.
THE BACK O' BEYONT
I
O nest, leaf-hidden, Dryad's green alcove,
Half-islanded by hill-brook's seaward rush,
My lovers still bower, where none may come but I!
Where in clear morning prime and high noon hush
With only some old poet's book I lie!
Sometimes a lonely dove
Calleth her mate, or droning honey thieves
Weigh down the bluebell's nodding campanule;
And ever singeth through the twilight cool
Low voice of water and the stir of leaves.