Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/229

Rh the Transvaal. In Old Edinburgh, the mistress of a bonny land in Advocates' Close, when the christening came on after a lying-in, sat up in bed in high dress and received her acquaintances who came to congratulate her and taste her sweet-cakes. This was the cummers' (French, commére) feast, or in Dutch the kraam-bezuk (German, Besuch) visit. Cummer is still a general rustic synonym for a lass. In the Transvaal the bed on such occasions is the kraam, a booth or screen, also the name of those stalls, the krames, that were hidden away between St. Giles and the Luckenbooths in Old Edinburgh. They were borrowed from the picturesque shops that surround the cathedrals of the Netherlands. A Kram in Germany is a small shop, but the custom of the kraam-bezuk is there known as the Kind- (child) or Wochenbett (bed). Another singular survival both of Teutonic social customs and vocables, is a Boer opsij or rustic wooing. The term is a variant of up-sit (omission of final dental). The "up-set" in a Scots burgh was the fee payable to the craft on admission to the trading privileges of a master. The conviviality attending the function long survived among artisans as a "foy." When a meisjie, or a widow well tochered with sufficient skaap (sheep), is visited by an eligible Dopper, "kom tae vrij" (woo), he off-saddles, and, if graciously received, prepares to improve the occasion with the bucolic reserve of the Laird of Dumbiedykes. The vrouw takes the long candles from the shrank (cupboard), and leaves wooer and wooed to sit up together till the grey dawn breaks, a custom which, in one form or another, rural Scotland long looked on kindly. The envied fair one, who has many of such vrijers, may have to sit up four or five nights a week till the eventful choice is made.

There is abundant evidence in language to prove that the ancient Northumbria—that is, Lowland Scotland from Tay to Humber—was a Frisian or Dutch settlement. Both find their affinities in the fertile plains of the lower Danube among those Goths for whom their good countryman, Bishop Wulfila, translated the gospels into their vernacular in the fourth century. The very tones of his converts live in the Dutch—