"An' what wind has blawn ye awa' frae Sandyknowes this nicht? It takes naething less than an earthquake to shake ye awa' frae Mirren. Ye hae fair forgotten that there's ither folk in the warl."
"I was wanting the lend o' your cradle, guidwife," said Alick, with affected shamefacedness, well aware of the astonishment he would occasion by the simple request.
Mistress Fraser had been stooping over a basin in which she was mixing meal and other ingredients, to form the white puddings for which she was famous. She stood up suddenly erect, like a bow straightening itself. Then she looked sternly at Alick.
"Ye are a nice cunning wratch to be an elder—you and Mirren Terregles baith—and at your time o' life. An' hoo is she?"
"Ow, as weel as could hae been expectit," said Muckle Alick, with just the proper amount of hypocritical resignation demanded by custom on these occasions. Mistress Fraser, whose mind ran naturally on the lines along which Muckle Alick had directed it, was completely taken in.
"An' what has Mirren gotten?—a lassie, I'll wager," said the excited mother of eleven, dusting her hands of the crumblings of the pudding suet, and then beginning breathlessly to smooth her hair and take off her baking apron. So excited was she that she could not find the loop.
"Aye," said Alick, quietly, "there's a lassie!"
"I juist kenned it," said Mistress Fraser, drawing up wisdom from the mysterious wells of her experience; "muckle men and wee wives aye start aff wi' a lassie—contrarywise they begin wi' a laddie. Noo me and my man——"
What terrible revelation of domestic experience would inevitably have followed, remains unfortunately unknown. For the words which at that moment Muckle Alick delicately let drop, as the chemist drops a rare essence into two ounces of distilled water, brought Mistress Fraser to a dead stop in the fulness of her career after the most intimate domestic reminiscences.
"But there's a laddie come too!" said Muckle Alick, and looked becomingly at the ground.