Page:Comical tricks of Lothian Tom (3).pdf/10

 10            but, when she saw her white, sighed and said, Alas! thou'll ne'er be like the kindly brute, my Black Lady, and yet ye rout as            like her as ony ever I did hear. But says Tom to himself, 'tis a mercy you know not what she says, or all would be wrong yet. So in two or three days the old woman put forth her braw rigget cow in the morn- ing with the rest of her neighbour's cattle, but it came on a sore day of heavy rain, which washed away all the white from her face and back; so the old woman's Black Lady came home at night, and her rigget cow went away with the shower, and was never heard of. But Tom's father having some suspicion, and looking narrowly into the cow's face found some of the chalk not washed away, and then he gave poor Tom a hearty beating, and sent him away to            seek his fortune with a skin full of sore bones.

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P A R T III.

TOM being now turned to his own shifts, considered with himself how to raise a little more money; and so gets a string as near as he could guess to be the length of his mother, and to Edinburgh he goes, to a wright who was acquainted with his