Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/178

154 in Buchan, “Finevir the twa met, they wir in o ane anither's witters (withers), jist like twa kyard wives.”

The interest of dialect is not confined to the discovery of roots and affinities. It has preserved traces of many old customs. Thus the very primitive habit of beating down prices in bargaining, known as prigging, found no favour with my friend, who called it "a nashince (nuisance), just an ug," using in ug a very old word, still heard in the Border district. But it survives in ugly and ogre. He took an ug (dislike) at’s meht” is a phrase from Buchan. In Orkney and Shetland the bat is the oagar hiuuse, from a root, ogra, to frighten. Similarly the bauky bird of Burns is what bogles or frightens, such as a bat or a ghost.

Modern sports have done much to wean boys from the primitive delights of the monkey. A harmless amusement of the young was to pluck the long stalks of the ribwort, and, hitting each other's in turn, try which flower head would be first broken off. This my friend knew as playing at sogers with the carl-doddy. “We used,” he said, “ to fecht wi'd till wurr reegment was throo.” In Beattie's “ Arnha'," the work of a Mearns man (1820), we read,—

A red-letter day in the rural year was that of the clyack feast, when the hindmost pickle of corn was reaped, plaited together, and carried in triumph as The Maiden. The name is Celtic, cailleach, a woman wearing the caillie or cowl (Lat. cucullus). I was told that the farm hands always “hed a feastie at Clyack, getting leave, too, to spread butter on the pieces ad lib;" at other times the most they got was “a knottie o' butter.” And at Hallow-e'en, when the ingathering of corn and tatties was completed, “there was a big denner and a big tea." Another feast of a different kind marked the last sad scene of all—the lyk-wake. Lyk, a corpse, a word entirely gone unless as the affixly, was once in general use. In Shetland the leek-strae was the straw placed under the corpse in bed. “Calm as a leek,” still as the dead, was applied to the unruffled sea. In Moray it was a disgrace to have a corpse in the house with nothing beside it night and