Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/144

120 a stronghold of the Earls of Strathmore. The last laird, like the other impecunious but very faintly Jacobite Fife ones, went out in "The Fifteen," and the forfeited estate fell as a realisable asset to the Yorks Building Company, which tore down the venerable pile, noted for the painted ceiling of its hall, to make cow byres. The quaint sun-dial of the castle is now at Glamis. Nothing remains but two rows of yews, terror, as a poison, to the farmer and his stirks, and a portion of the ditch that once drained the moat. Its name, the Water-gate-aillie (alley), suggested the fact that here had been a raised causeway that communicated with the kirk toon across the swampy hollow. This sluggish ditch was a favourite haunt of tadpoles, the "gellies " of the boys. This was also the name for the sliddery leech. A Falkland man was using a leech for swollen tonsils, when suddenly a neighbour woman looking on exclaimed, "Goavy-dick! he's swallowed the gelly." In time the estate was bought by a "nabob," a Scot who had made a fortune in the East at a time when, as Lord Rosebery neatly puts it, the all-powerful Henry Dundas was busy "Scotticising India and Orientalising Scotland." The improving laird ran a deep-cut canal from end to end of the marshy bottom, turning it into fields of the richest loam.

From the foot of the Paith or steep ascent to the kirk hill the village street was continued across the drained valley by a newer line, where the feuars reared their trim cots on the edge of the highroad in the hideous fashion of the orthodox Scottish village. There they plied the shuttle and reeled the pirns in sweet content in the pre-Malthusian days, when a lying-in brought a welcome bread-winner,—

The weaver said unto his son, The day 'at he was born, 'Blessins on yer curly pow! Ye'll rin for pirns the morn.

The brisk times of the great French war, when Osnaburgs kept all hands busy, were followed at a long interval by two disturbing elements. A great railway tore its ruthless track across the smiling hollow, and buried its placid, canal-like stream deep down in a gloomy condie (conduit), the home of