Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/169

Rh Saturday evening to the strains of the tripper's melodeon and the wry-necked fife.”

Some fine trees in the haugh are probably patriarchs of the pre-Reformation period, but the dense coverts on the surrounding hills, closing in far to west with the vast woods of Altyre beside the Findhorn river, are the growth of last century. Till then all these north-eastern parts were the bleakest and barest in Scotland. In the youth of my friend the picturesque counted for little. Above stretched the monotonous brown of the moorland, in the bottom of the vale were the frequent miry hollows where the sheep got drowned or the cow “lairdet." Rutty, stone-strewn tracks led to the frequent clachan or humble homestead. Over the Heldon, on the great north road, the “Defiance” rolled on its way to Inverness, a daily excitement to Elgin, where it brought the London letters late in the afternoon of the third day after posting. Life in the vale was purely agricultural. Ploughmen had up to £10 a year, with board; such artisans as got jobs made but half a crown a day. A weaver, working his longest and hardest, might have ten shillings a week.

It is significant that the minister and the schoolmaster found no place in my friend's narrative. Naturally his ideas grouped themselves round the farm. A large proportion of his words belong to the common stock of Lowland dialect, so I select only the more novel ones, passing over, at the same time, any comment on his own interesting personality. I knew the term wrack for the refuse of weeds from the fields, but he called it brintlin (burnings). This refuse of the fields was mainly formed of “ quickens" or couch-grass and knap or knot-grass, as in “Comus"—“with knot-grass dew-sprent.” This latter was red with knobs or knaps at intervals on the stalk. One of my own boyish diversions into wild life was to bury potatoes in the heap of burning wrack, and to pull them out when roasted and eat them piping hot. New to me was his term, a wining, for "a bittie o' a field.” “Fou arr ee gettin' on?” “O, I've jist a wining to dee.” So, too, his "fleed,” a head-or end-rig in a field. The obsolete thig, to beg, once in general use, was applied to the thriftless ones who would go from house to house for “pucklies o corn” at sowing time, or for a sheaf when reap-