THE BLUE EYES OF AILIE
When first I went to Cairn Edward as a medical man on my own account, I had little to do with the district of Glenkells. For one thing, there was a resident doctor there, Dr. Campbell—Ignatius Campbell—and in those days professional boundaries were more strictly observed than they have been in more recent years. But in time, whether owing to the natural spread of my practice, or through some small name which I got in the countryside, owing to a successful treatment of tubercular cases, I found myself oftener and oftener in the Glenkells. And, indeed, ever since I began to be able to keep a stated assistant, it has been my custom to take day about with him on the Glenkells round.
But in what follows I speak of the very early years when I had still little actual connection with the district. The Glenkells folk are always in the habit of referring to themselves as a community apart. They may, indeed, in extreme cases include the rest of the United Kingdom—but, as it were, casually. Thus, "If the storm continues it will be a sair winter in Glenkells, and the rest o' the country!"
Or when some statesman conspicuously blundered, or a foreign nation involved themselves in superfluous difficulties, you could not go into a farmhouse or traverse the length of the main street of the Clachan without hearing the words: "The like o' that could never hae happened i' the Glenkells!"
So there arose a proverb which, though of local origin, was not without a certain wider acceptation: "As conceity as Glenkells," or, in a more diffuse form: "Glenkells cocks craw aye croosest an' on a muckler midden!"
But Glenkells wotted little of such slurs, or if it minded at all took them for compliments with a solid and irrefutable foundation. On the other hand, it retorted upon the rest of the world in characteristic fashion, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. As thus: "Tak' care o' him. He's no to be trustit. His grandfaither cam' frae Borgue!" Or, more allusively: "Aye, a Nicholson aye needs watchin'. They a' come frae Kirkcudbright, where the jail is!"
One peculiarity of the speech of this country within a country struck me more than all the others—perhaps because it came in the line of my own profession.
More than once an applicant for my services would say, in answer to my question: "Have you called in the doctor?" "Oh, no, it has no been so serious as that!" Succeedantly I would find that Dr. Ignatius Campbell had been in attendance for some time, and that I ought to have consulted with him before, as it were, jumping his claim.
Dr. Campbell was a queer, dusty, smoky old man who, when seen abroad, sat low in a kind of basket-phaeton—as it were, on the small of his back, and visited his patients in a kind of dreamy exaltation which many put down to drink. They were wrong. The doctor was something much harder to cure—an habitual opium-eater. Somehow Dr. Campbell had never taken the position in the Glenkells to which his abilities entitled him. He came from the North, and that was against him. More than that, he sent in his bills promptly, and saw that they were settled. Worst of all, he took no interest in imaginary diseases.
He openly laughed at calomel—which in the Glenkells was looked upon as a kind of blaspheming of the Trinity. But he was a duly certified graduate of Edinburgh like myself. His name was on the Medical List, and only his unfortunate habit and the dreamy idleness engendered by it kept him from making a very considerable name for himself in his profession. I found, for instance, after his death (he left his books, papers, and instruments to me) that he had actually anticipated in his vague theoretical way some of the most applauded discoveries of more recent times, and that he was well versed in all the foreign literature of such subjects as interested him.