Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/155

Rh the self-recommendation that the candidate "held a plough afore" (before), replied: "That's niver the wye, mannie. Ye min aye hud a ploo ahint, niver afore." The man had served with a Dundee cowfeeder or dairyman, and therefore was "gleger than usual." In the smiddy the horse was equally attractive. The "flaws," or ends broken off the shoenails when driven home, were prized to aid in joiner work. The "treviss," or framework for restive horses, quite a local use of a common term, served as a sort of gymnastic apparatus. A plain farmer, at a banquet met the waiter's frequent change of plates, to suit the development of the menu, with "Thir's nae trevisses in my stammick." One smiddy treviss (Lat. trabs, a beam) I well remember. It was a popular gymnastics apparatus for the boys. Two of us had planted the "dool" or mark for quoits in front of it. I had tried my best but failed to hit it. Unfortunately the other boy was at the moment swinging on the treviss, when the quoit (a disc of thickish slate) caught him. As he was three years my senior, and had a fiendish temper on occasion, I made off instanter. For some days I managed to evade his nursed wrath. Homewards from school one day, however, I caught a back view of him as he was proceeding down the street. I had hoped to jink him and gain the shelter of home before he turned around, but, alas! luck was against me. He turned, and—I had to pay up at compound interest.

With the cow there was acquaintance, not friendship. The old custom of taking all the cows to a common pasture under a common herd was dying out, though practised as late as the fifties. The picturesque feature of the horn-call was absent. More frequently there fell to the lot of the boy the bother of grazing crummie on "bauks" (green narrow paths between fields) for weary hours by the branks, and the terror of bringing her home "hefet" or "hovin" ("swoln with wind and the dank mist they draw"—Lycidas), the result of indiscretion among wet clover. In Orcadian ger-bick is the strip of grass between the corn-rigs in the days of small hordings. It is a compound of ger (gerss or grass) and bauk. In the stall she was secured by the "baikie," or upright post—a term applied in the North-east to the peg that secured the tether in the field, and itself but peg