Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/145

Rh eels and puddocks and drowned kittlens. The old-fashioned gardens, with their brier, elder, and rizzar (currant) bushes, their artless clumps of bachelor's buttons, gardener's gairtens, dusty miller (auricula), balm, spinks, apple-reengie, speengie (peony) roses, spearmint, and lily-oak (lilac), gave place to coal bings (Fife knew not coal-rees) and lyes for trucking tawties and nowt. A still greater upheaval in the moral world was the new broom of Dissent, with its out-crop of unrest and bad blood. Down at the lower end of the village rose a rival subscription school, where a learned unfortunate, some licentiate under a cloud, starved on £10 a year, school pence and non-Intrusion principles. His successor, a man of many secular activities in spite of a lame leg, came to the village with this ambiguous recommendation: "The character of Mr. A B is well known in this parish." Near this nursery of Dissent a barn-like Free Church opened the door of its gavel-end on the high road to welcome the swarm from the Erastian hive. The tailor's wife eagerly took the new road, coveting the eldership for her man. Discussing church politics amid a circle of her "cummers," she stoutly maintained that the days of auld Babylon on the school hill were numbered, assuring them that "ye min gang doon the toon if ye waant to hae yer sowl saved." A local variant of a saying, conceived in a similar spirit, credited a Dissenter with the remark, àpropos of the future happiness of a parishioner lately deceased, "I hae my doots; ye see she didna gang to oor meetin' at Lucklaw Hill."

Those were the days, consule Planco, of sunshine and gladness, when the worry of the great world was far remote. There were no big dailies then, only a threepenny bi-weekly, and the one copy that came, franked by its stamp, went round its circle of readers in turn. The circulation was managed by the Sergeant, a veteran of the Kaffir wars, and a striking contrast to Sandy Awrnot, a battered, one-armed wreck from Chilianwallah and Sobraon, who had nothing more interesting about him than a rusty blue swallow-tail coat with brass buttons, a passion for snuff and the speediest liquidation of his pension. The Sergeant was intelligent and interesting, as when he told a thrilling tale of the wily Kaffir crawling up to assegai the sentry at his lonely post by the laager, amid the stillness of the