[#] Some of the earlier and less reputable of the "Hempie's" adventures may be found in a certain unscientific work entitled "Lad's Love."
For instance, the year after Nance and I were married, the Hempie abruptly claimed her share of her mother's money, and departed to Edinburgh "to get learning."
Now it was a common thing enough in our part of the country for boys to go out on such a quest. It was unheard of in a girl. And the parish would have been shocked if the emigrant had been any other than the Hempie. But Miss Elizabeth Chrystie, daughter of Peter of Nether Neuk, was a young woman not accustomed to be bound by ordinary rules. In person she had grown up handsome rather than pretty, and was so athletic that she stood in small need of the ordinary courtesies which girls love—hands over stiles, and so forth. Eyes and hair of glossy jet, the latter crisping naturally close to her head, a healthy colour in her cheeks, an ironic curl to her firm fine lips,—that is how our Hempie came back to us.
Of her career in the metropolis, of the boarding-school dames, strait-laced and awful, whom she scandalised, the shut ways of learning which somehow were opened before her, I have no room here to tell. It is sufficient to say that out of all this the Hempie came home to Nether Neuk, and at once established herself as the wonder of the neighbourhood.
Nance was gone, Grace going; Clemmy Kilpatrick, the unobtrusive little woman whom Peter Chrystie had married as a kind of foot-warmer, had been laid aside for six weeks with an "income" on her knee. The maidservants naturally took advantage. Every individual pot and pan in the house cumbered the back kitchen unwashed and begrimed. In the byres you did not walk—you waded. The ploughmen hung about the house half the morning, gossiping with the half-idle maidens. The very herds on the hill eluded Peter's feeble judicature, and lay asleep behind dyke-backs, while the week-weaned lambs, with many tail-wagglings, rejoined their mothers on the pastures far below.
Upon this confusion enter the New Hempie. And with her gown pinned up and a white apron on that met behind her shapely figure, she set to and helped the servants.
In six days she had the farm town of Nether Neuk in such a state of perfection as it had not known since my own Nance left it. For Grace, though a good girl enough, cared not a jot for house work. Her sphere was the dairy and cheese-room, where in an atmosphere of simmering curds and bandaged cheddars she reigned supreme.
So much to indicate to those who are not acquainted with Miss Elizabeth Chrystie the kind of girl she was.
For the rest, she despised love and held wooers in contempt, as much as she had done in the old days when she ascended the roofs of the pigstyes, and climbed into the beech-tree tops in the courtyard of Nether Neuk, rather than meet me face to face as I went to pay my court to her eldest sister.
"Love——" she said, scornfully, when I questioned her on the subject the first time she came to see us at Cairn Edward, "love—have Nance and you no got ower sic nonsense yet? Love——" (still more scornfully); "as if I hadna seen as much of that as will serve me for my lifetime, wi' twa sisters like Grace and Nance there!"