"Come ben! This way, sir—and you, too, Joe," she cried, opening a door into an inner room, "ye will no hae seen Meysie's bairns?"
As I had never even heard of Meysie, I certainly had not.
But the goodwife's next words enlightened me.
"Caleb, ye see, was marriet afore he took up wi' me. 'Deed, his lassie Meysie is maybe aulder than I am mysel'—and a solit, sensible woman. But this is the first time her bairns hae comed sae far to see me!"
She flung the door open, and there, sitting one on a sofa, and the other on a footstool by the fire, I saw two grown-up young ladies—so at least they appeared to me. And I began to fear that my tea was going to cost me dear. For at that time conversation was a difficult art to me with anyone whom I could neither fight nor call names.
The girls—twenty or twenty-two they seemed—oh, ever so old—looked just as if they had been doing nothing. That is, the one with the straight-cut face, very dignified, who made a kind of long droopy picture of herself on the sofa, was reading a book, or pretending to, while the other on the stool did nothing but nurse her knees and look out at the window.
That was the one I liked best, though, of course, not like Elsie—I should think not, indeed. But she was little, she had a merry face, and I am sure she had been laughing just before we came in. Indeed, I am none so sure that she had not been listening at the keyhole and made a rush for the footstool.
"Bairns," said Mrs. Caleb the Second, "this is the Englishy minister, and a kind friend o' us auld folk. Though Caleb, your gran'dad, gies him awfu' spells o' argumentincation aboot things I ken nocht aboot! 'Deed, I wonder whiles that Maister Ablethorpe ever looks near us again!"
"Oh, no," said the Hayfork Minister, smiling, "it takes two to make an argument, and I never argue with Mr. Fergusson. I only receive instruction, as a younger from an elder!"
"Hear to him," cried the goodwife, "he doesna mean a word he is sayin'—I can aye tell by the glint in his e'e."