"Three feet and a half across the bosom," said Aminadab, who was still in his reverie, with the secret idea still exercising a power over him, even after the tankard of ale.
"Wide in my mind and charities, ye fool, man," continued she, not disinclined this time to laugh; for she was proud of being jolly in the person. "I felt for poor Kalee. She wept incessantly at the loss of the cow's tail, and asked me if I had seen it, nay, implored me like a worshipper to try to recover it for her. I said, God forgive me, that I had seen it in the dung-pit, and that George had carted it away. 'And didn't know de value!' cried Ady. 'Worth de necklace of diamonds;' and both she and Kalee broke out into such a yell as made the house ring. Yet with all this, Kalee still loved the gloomy man. She would throw her jewelled arms about his neck, and hang upon him, with her feet off the ground, so little, light, and lithe. She was so like a sapling, you could have bent her any way. And when the love was in her heart, and it was never absent, she was really bonny. Our eyes hereaway are mere cinders to these glowing churley bits of flaming sulphur; and then that strange look of the shining face, just as if she yearned to enter into his very soul,—ay, as the souls of these black creatures go up and form a part of Brahma's spirit, that's all over the earth."
"All art," cried Aminadab, getting impatient of Janet's eloquence—eloquence, I say; for Janet was a superior woman, and, though a cook, a natural genius. "All art. 'And he made her to use enchantments, and deal with familiar spirits and wizards,'"
"No, no, man, it was all real nature. But it wasna real nature made him throw the poor black soul away, whose gold and jewels he had bartered his white, I should say yellow, rotten-livered body for. Ay, if she had been a man, I would have liked her better than him; for, as I hate the skin of an old hen when the fat becomes rancid and golden, so do I hate a yellow-faced man, with the devil sitting gnawing at his liver."
"The reason the devil's so bitter," said Aminadab.
"Ay, if you were to try a beef-steak off his rump or spare-rib, ye'll find it more like the absynth I use in the kitchen than the flesh of a capon or three-year old stot."
"Yea, I would be like unto him who was made to 'suck honey out of the living rock.'"
"The cruel man threw her away from him, just as if her tocher had been the weight of herself in copper, instead of gold. And oh! it was so easily done; for the creature was not only, as I have said, light, but she had such a touchiness when her glancing eye saw that her love was not returned by him she loved beyond all the earth, that you would have thought she shrunk all up into a tiny child, couring in the corner of the big drawing-room, so like a wounded bird."
"Yaw-aw-aw," yawned the Seceder, half asleep. "'And he gave up the ghost in the room, while he sought his meat to relieve his soul.'"
"Asleep and dreaming," cried Mrs. M'Pherson, who had got into the very spirit of description. "Away to the Scouring Burn, and never show your face here again."