Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/156

132 in the guise of the favourite diminutive. The open trench or "gruip" (Ger. Graben, a ditch) made the byre unsavoury. The term is common for a ditch in the fields in Ulster, in Kent, and even in the Transvaal. Arthur Young says that the roads a little way to the north of London were in his time (1780) made troublesome and even dangerous by the “grips, trenches cut across the road to keep it dry before the advent of Macadam. It has lived in popular verse, as here,—

The calving was momentous, for on that hung the milk supply. If the cow was "yeld" (in calf but not in milk), or "foarrie" (not in calf), there was no milk, but only a poor substitute, "treacle-peerie," made of sweetened water mixed with barm (yeast) to produce a perfectly harmless ale, feebler even than penny-whaup. "Peerie" (small) is a strange survival from Norse times in the East coast. It is very common in Orkney. There the infant school is the "peerie squeel." Scott in his Life says that "Stevenson, the engineer, landing at N. Ronaldshay, was forced to rout out of bed a mannikin of a missionary whom, because he was so peerie, the Selkies suspected of being a Pecht or elf" (quoted by Tudor). The "beist," or first milk after calving, was too strong to be palatable. When the milk was drawn in the cog it was "sie'd" (sieved), laid away in "kimmins" (shallow tubs), and reamed (Ger. Rahm, cream; Cape Dutch, room) for the churn. Rarely was the sweet or unreamed milk used for drinking, a substitute being found in the skimmed or in the butter milk, known as soor-dook (cf. dough and the Sauer-teig of "Sartor Resartus"). The bappy-faced nonentity was graphically but unkindly described as "daichie" (doughy). The Edinburgh schoolboy, recognising in the Militia the ploughmen that brought the milk to town, derisively christened them "soor-dook sogers." For cheese-making the stomach of a calf was held in reserve, filled