I recollect, as well as yesterday, that on the Sundays he wore a braid bannet with a red worsted cherry on the tap o’t; and had a single-breasted coat, square in the tails, of light Gilmerton blue, with plaited white buttons, bigger than crown pieces. His waistcoat was low in the neck, and had flap pouches, wherein he kept his mull for rappee, and his tobacco box. To look at him, wi’ his rig-and-fur Shetland hose pulled up ower his knees, and his big glancing buckles in his shoon, sitting at our doorcheek, clean and tidy as he was kept, was just as if one of the ancient patriarchs had been left on earth, to let succeeding survivors witness a picture of hoary and venerable eld. Puir body, mony a bit Gibraltar-rock and gingerbread did he give to me, as he would pat me on the head, and prophesy that I would be a great man yet; and sing me bits of auld sangs, about the bloody times of the Rebellion and Prince Charlie. There was nothing that I liked so well as to hear him set a-going with his auld warld stories and lilts; though my mother used sometimes to say, “Wheesht, grandfaither, ye ken it’s no canny to let out a word of thae things; let byganes be byganes, and forgotten.” He never liked to gie trouble, so a rebuke of this kind would put a tether to his tongue for a wee; but when we were left by ourselves, I used aye to egg him on to tell me what he had come through in his far-away travels beyond the broad seas; and of the famous battles he had seen and shed his precious blood in; for his pinkie was hacked off by a dragoon of Cornel Gardiner’s down by at Prestonpans, and he had catched a bullet with his ankle over in the north at Culloden. So it was no wonder that he liked to crack about these times, though they had brought him muckle and no little mischief, having obliged him to skulk like another Cain among the Highland hills and heather, for many a long month and day, homeless and hungry. Not dauring to be seen in his own country, where his head would have been chacked off like a sybo, he took leg-bail in a ship, over the sea, among the Dutch folk; where he followed out his lawful trade of a cooper, making girrs for the herring barrels, and so on; and sending, when he could find time and opportunity, such savings from his wages as he could afford, for the maintenance of his wife and small family of three helpless weans, that he had been obliged to leave, dowie and destitute, at their native home of pleasant Dalkeith.
At lang and last, when the breeze had blown ower, and the feverish pulse of the country began to grow calm and cool, auld grandfaither took a longing to see his native land; and, though not free of jeopardy from king’s cutters on the sea, and from spies on shore, he risked his neck over in a sloop from Rotterdam to Aberlady, that came across with a valuable cargo of smuggled gin. When grandfaither had been obliged to take the wings of flight for the preservation of his life and liberty, my faither was a wean at grannie’s breast: so, by her fending,—for she was a canny, industrious body, and kept a bit shop, in the which she sold oatmeal and red herrings, needles and prins, potaties and tape, and cabbage, and what not,—he had grown a strapping laddie of eleven or twelve, helping his two sisters, one of whom perished of the measles in the dear year, to gang errands, chap sand, carry water, and keep the housie clean. I have heard him say, when auld granfaither came to their door at the dead of night, tirling, like a thief o’ darkness, at the window-brod to get in, that he was so altered in his voice and lingo, that no living soul kenned him, not even the wife of his bosom; so he had to put grannie in mind of things that had happened between them, before she would allow my faither to lift the sneck, or draw the bar. Many and many a year, for gude kens how long after, I’ve heard tell that his speech was so Dutchified as to be scarcely kenspeckle to a Scotch European; but Nature is powerful, and in the course of time he came in the upshot to gather his words together like a Christian.
Of my auntie Bell, that, as I have just said, died of measles in the dear year, at the age of fourteen, I have no story to tell but one, and that a short one, though not without a sprinkling of interest.
Among her other ways of doing, grannie kept a cow, and sold the milk round about to the neighbours in a pitcher, whiles carried by my faither, and whiles by my aunties, at the ransom of a ha’penny the mutchkin. Well, ye observe, that the cow ran yield, and it was as plain as pease that the cow was with calf;—Geordie Drowth, the horse-doctor, could have made solemn affidavy on that head. So they waited on, and better waited on, for the prowie’s calving, keeping it upon draff and aitstrae in the byre; till one morning every thing seemed in a fair way, and my auntie Bell was set out to keep watch and ward.
Some of her companions, howsoever, chancing to come by, took her out to the back of the house to have a game at the pallall; and, in the interim, Donald Bogie, the tinkler from Yetholm, came and left his little jackass in the byre, while he was selling about his crockery of cups and saucers and brown plates, on the auld ane, through the town, in two creels.
In the middle of auntie Bell’s game, she heard an unco noise in the byre; and, kenning that she had neglected her charge, she ran round the gable, and opened the door in a great hurry; when, seeing the beastie, she pulled it to again, and fleeing, half out of breath, into the kitchen, cried, “Come away, come away, mother, as fast as ye can. Eh, lyst, the cow’s cauffed,—and it’s a cuddie!”
The weaver he gaed up the stair,
Dancing and singing;