This is the somewhat remarkable story the Hempie told my wife as she sat sewing in the little parlour overlooking the garden, the day Master Alexander McQuhirr, Tertius, cut his first tooth.[#]
[#] This, however, was not discovered till afterwards, and was then acclaimed as the reason why he cried so much on the arrival of his aunt Elizabeth. To his nearest relative on the father's side, however, the young gentleman's performances seemed entirely normal.—A. McQ.
Elizabeth Chrystie was a free-spoken young woman, and she told her tale generally in the English of the schools, but sometimes in the plain countryside talk she had spoken when, a barefoot bare-legged lass, she had scrieved the hills, the companion of every questing collie and scapegrace herd lad, 'twixt the Bennan and the Butt o' Benerick.
"When I first got to Craignesslin," said the Hempie, "I thought I had better turn me about and come right back again. And if it had not been for pride, that is just what I should have done."
"Were they not kind to you?" asked Nance.
"Kind? Oh, kind enough—it was not that. I could easily have put an end to any unkindness by walking over the hill. But I could not. To tell the truth, the place took hold of me from the first hour.
"Craignesslin, you know, is a great house, with many of the rooms unoccupied, sitting high up on the hills, a place where all the winds blow, and where the trees are mostly scrubby scrunts of thorn, turning up their branches like skeleton hands asking for alms, or shrivelled birches and cowering firs all bent away from the west.
"When first I saw the place I thought that I could never bide there a day—and now it looks as if I were going to live there all my life.
"The hired man from the livery stables in Drumfern set my box down on the step of the front door, and drove off as fast as he could. He had a long way before him, he said, the first five miles with not so much as a cottage by the wayside. He meant a public-house.
"He was a rude boor. And when I told him so he only laughed and said: 'For a' that ye'll maybe be glad to see me the next time I come—even if I bring a hearse for ye to ride to the kirkyaird in!'