Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/187

Rh The few words calling for remark are drintin, evidently a modification of droning; scrabs, a variant of scrub, shrub, applied to self-sown, stunted trees; doddies, cows of the polled Angus variety. Doddy is a round, ball-like head, as the seed-stalk of the ribwort. Edmonston has curl-doddy, naturally clever, where curl is carle, or kêrel, a man. The word reminds one of Burns's phrase, a stalk of carl-hemp.

Cissy Wood, the owner of the cottage, was a most remarkable specimen of the best type of the Scottish peasantry. She was born early in last century at the Limpit Mill, overhanging a brattling burn, one of many that have worn a steep descent for themselves into the North Sea through the cliff wall that frowns on the tumbling waves at its feet between Stonehaven and Muchalls. She had worked steadily since seven "intill the mull," as she put it. "Speak aboot half-timers! I wuzz ay a hail-timer." When the larder, never very full, was low, grumbling was met with, "If ee dinna tak that, ee can lick wint," equally significant whether we take the wint here for wind or want.

Her temperament must always have run to the masculine rather than to the weaker side. She was twenty-four before she learnt stocking-knitting, or shank-wiving as she called it, using one of the commonest of names for stockings, shanks, known at one time all over Lowland Scotland. Her time was devoted to her croft, her garden, and her workshop, for she has in her own fashion solved the problem of a self-contained independence on the land. She has been joiner, blacksmith, and general mechanician to the neighbourhood, her "neepers" as she called them. She could handle a hei-sned (scythe), turn a lay (lathe), or put together a meal-bowie with the best. Her two "freits" in gardening were raising potatoes from the "plooms" (seed-capsule) and growing fantastic walking sticks. The potatoes were, the first year, the size of peas, and could be "eatt 'gin the third eer." In colour they were daintily mottled, black, brokkit and white. Her "brokkit" is familiar Gaelic for anything, say a trout or fern, that is speckled or variegated in spots. The walking sticks grew freely from willow slips. The branches, as they developed, were ingeniously intertwined. When matured, smoothed, and varnished they