Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/142

118 the genuine Rob Dow (pronounced Doo) as the reader of Burns knows,—

They would surely never speak of Roderick Dhu in such a tone, though it is substantially the same name. The Scots long vowel, as in Rob, always presents difficulties to the Southron. Thus the Englishman thinks his absurd "Rabbie" Burns quite to the manner born. A somewhat similar misrendering of Scottish vernacular is the impossible "Babbie" of the "Little Minister." Barbara is familiarised as Baubie. The elided r always lengthens a contiguous vowel.

Let me endeavour in the following sketch to visualise a Fifeshire village at a time when its folk were still bi-lingual, when they had not long had to part with their handlooms, to welcome the iron horse, and to forget the turmoil of the Disruption. The scene is a kirk toon, red-tiled like the East Coast villages, and straggling in one street up the rough ascent called the Paith, and over the school hill, to disappear into the open country round one side of the churchyard. Where the bairns romped between lessons, pre-historic villagers had laid their dead, only to be gradually exhumed in toothless chafts and crumbling harn-pans (skulls), that, from time to time, revealed themselves in the cosy nooks among the stone coffins, where the lassies played at selling sugar and tea with the crisp, bony soil. On the crest of the broad knowe stood a newer God's-acre, but even it so old that the accumulated soil concealed the sculptured base of the thirteenth century tower, beloved of artists and architects. Those Goths, the parish heritors, left the unique apse to the betheral (sexton) for his shools and coffin-trams, and obliterated its exquisite Norman arch with a lath and plaster partition so as to complete the eastern end of