"Me!" answered I, shaking and staring.
"Yes," said he; "Jess, the minister's maid, told me last night that you had been giving up your name at the manse. Ay, it's ower true, for she showed me the apples ye gied her in a present. This is a bonny story, Mansie, my man, and you only at your apprenticeship yet."
Terror and despair had struck me dumb. I stood as still and as stiff as a web of buckram. My tongue was tied, and I couldna contradict him. Jamie faulded his arms and gaed away whistling, turning every now and then his sooty face over his shoulder and mostly sticking his tune, as he could not keep his mouth screwed for laughing. What would I not have given to have laughed too!
There was no time to be lost; this was the Saturday. The next rising sun would shine on the Sabbath. Ah, what a case I was in; I could mostly have drowned myself had I not been frighted. What could I do? My love had vanished like lightning; but oh, I was in a terrible gliff! Instead of gundy, I sold my thrums to Mrs. Walnut for a penny, with which I bought at the counter a sheet of paper and a pen, so that in the afternoon I wrote out a letter to the minister telling him what I had been given to hear, and begging him, for the sake of mercy, not to believe Jess's word, as I was not able to keep a wife, and as she was a leeing gipsy.
PUSHING MY FORTUNE.
The days of the years of my apprenticeship having glided cannily over on the working board of my respected maister, James Hosey, where I sat working cross-legged like a busy bee in the true spirit of industrious contentment, I found myself at the end of the seven year so well instructed in the tailoring trade, to which I had paid a near-sighted attention, that, without more ado, I girt myself round about with a proud determination of at once cutting my mother's apron string and venturing to go without a hold. Thinks I to myself "faint heart never won fair lady," so, taking my stick in my hand, I set out towards Edinburgh as brave as a Hielander in search of a journeyman's place. I may set it down to an especial providence that I found one, on the very first day, to my heart's content in by at the Grassmarket where I stayed for the space of six calendar months.
Had it not been from a real sense of the duty I owed to my future employers, whomsoever they might be, in making myself a first-rate hand in the cutting, shaping, and sewing line, I would not have found courage in my breast to have helped me out through such a long and dreary time.
Never let us repine, howsomever, but consider that all is ordered for the best. The sons of the patriarch Jacob found out their brother Joseph in a foreign land, and where they least expected it, so it was here—even here where my heart was sickening unto death, from my daily and nightly thoughts being as bitter as gall—that I fell in with the greatest blessing of my life, Nanse Cromie!
In the flat below our workshop lived Mrs. Whitterraick, the wife of Mr. Whitterraick, a dealer in hens and hams in the poultry market, who, coming from the Lauder neighbourhood, had hired a bit wench of a lassie that was to follow them come the term. And who think ye should this lassie be but Nanse Cromie, afterwards, in the course of a kind providence, the honoured wife of my bosom, and the mother of bonny Benjie.
In going up and down the stairs—it being a common entry, ye observe—me may be going down with my everyday hat on to my dinner, and she coming up carrying a stoup of water or half-a-pound of pouthered butter on a plate, with a piece of paper thrown over it—we frequently met half-way, and had to stand still to let one another pass. Nothing came of these forgetherings, howsomever, for a month or two, she being as shy and modest as she was bonny, with her clean demity short gown and snow-white morning mutch, to say nothing of her cherry mou, and me unco douffie in making up to strangers. We could not help, nevertheless, to take aye a stoun look of each other in passing, and I was a gone man, bewitched out of my seven senses, falling from my claes, losing my stomach, and over the lugs in love, three weeks and some odd days before ever a single syllable passed between us.