Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/154

130 There was high revelry when the pig was killed. The blood, in view of black puddings to follow, had to be switched with a bundle of twigs to remove the fibrin, and so prevent clotting. Then the carcase was plumped into scalding water, to ploat (soak), so as to admit of the scraping process. In due course followed the feast of puddings, made from the "pluck," and cracklins, the chitterlings of the English villager. The lard that was extracted was "weel-hained" under the name of swine's "saim," a bit of dialect which appears in "Troilus and Cressida"—"The proud lord that bastes his arrogance with his own seam." The metaphor anticipates the historic one, " Stew in their own gravy." Lastly there were such special aids to friendship as "clack" (cf. Ger. Klecks, a blot), or clagum, the "gundy" of Edinburgh youth, "pawrlies," and "ha'penny deevils" (gingerbread figures, arms a-kimbo, currants for eyes), each offering a more popular fate for spare bawbees than the "pirlie-pig " or nursery savings bank. Gundy is still a favourite of youth. A village rhyme runs thus,—

The farm, its ways and animals, were ever interesting to the boy, himself a stock-raiser on his own account. Knowing in the breeds of doos and rabbits, the "niffering" of the progeny or the "swauping" of the cleckin (litter), with knives and bools as buit (luckpenny), prepared him for a commercial career. The two terrors of the farmyard were the turkey and the billy-goat. The latter was treated, across the wall, to sham offers of tobacco, while the former was greeted with the execration, "Bubbly-jock, your wife's a witch, and a' your bairns are warlocks." But the boy was proudest of all of the friendship of a horse. He knew his "monk" or head-stall (confined to Fife and Aberdeen), his haims, brecham, britchen, and rigwoodie, the necessary items in the harnessing. To walk alongside when he was in the theats (traces) or to hold the reins beside the swingle-tree when he was in the plough was a coveted distinction. A ploughman, appealed to one day by a boy to let him hold the stilts, with