Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/146

122 "veldt" and 'neath the passionless gaze of the Southern Cross. His thick guttural tones, as if he spoke with a stone in his throat, heightened the effect. He was indeed a gentleman, tall, straight, and broad shouldered, with bronzed, clean-shaven face, broad leather stock for collar, striped blue-and-white shirt with pearl buttons, blue fatigue jacket with brass buttons, and corduroys of the pattern known then as California, a name due to the late outbreak of "yellow fever" on the Pacific coast. He was a bachelor and lodged with the tailor, whose long, ill-girt figure had got for him, from some wit in the village, the nickname "Deuteronomy." The Sergeant mainly employed himself in digging up barrowloads of fir-tree roots, highly resinous, and excellent for kindling or eeldin, as the old folk called it. Nor should I forget the station-master, cheery, good-natured, obliging. As a man of many freits and fancies he was dear to the natural boy. Hens, bees, pigs, dogs, goats, and a donkey in turn ruled his energies. A stranger, making inquiries at a native, was referred to my friend as "the omnifeeshint man in the place."

Oh! those glorious days in that wood where the Sergeant's long-drawn pech accentuated the mattock's every blow. Heavenly were the sloping glades where one beaked (basked) in the sunshine among bracken and blaeberries and bell-heather, while whin and broom pods plunkt their peas on ruddy cheeks, and the fir-cones, known only as "taps," that were scattered around, turned out their recesses to the birsling sun, and the foggie-toddlers (yellow humble bee) hirpled about over the warm turf, among golacks (beetles) and clip-sheers (ear-wigs). The hum of bees and the chorus of birds mingled overhead in the sough of a languid breeze, and everything made for righteousness but the buzzing flies, the nagging midges, and the quiet but thorough prod of the glegs (gadfly). The lotus was too much in the air to tempt one to risk a joabing (jagging) by prying into the whin-buss for the mouse hole entrance to the rannies' (wren's) nest, to sclim the branchless stem of the fir for the keelie's (sparrow-hawk's) eyrie, or even to disturb the sugar industry by cutting into the bark of the birches to suck the sweet sap that seapt out on the sunny side. How poor and imperfect is "trickle out" beside its equivalent seap! An