Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/241

Rh section (p. 128). This imitative name for the cuckoo (A.S. gaec) denotes a simpleton in many lands. Its monotonous note inspires the Cumberland proverb, "Ye breed of the gowk, ye've nae rhyme but ane." Gibson, poet of the dales, has, "T' pooar lal gowk hesn't gumption enough."

"Een laffe meisje" is only a "giglot lassie," a very different thing from a "haughty hizzie." The sly humour, too, of "Duncan was a lad o' grace," has been missed in the phrase, "soft or tender-hearted man.” The sach here is a familiar Scottish word for soft, while, contemptuously, sauchie is a simpleton. In the Buchan dialect a selch is a big, stout, daichie or doughy fellow, somewhat after the fashion of the seal. Selch, in fact, is a dialect equivalent for seal, of which it is but the fuller form. On the whole "Daantjie Grouws" is a vigorous and characteristic specimen of the Boer vernacular, and gives a very favourable impression of the translator's literary tastes and sympathies. There remains only to add, that in all the piece under discussion we have but three terms with which the Boer war made us familiar—kop, trek and ons (our), which last is in the title of the Bond organ, "Ons Land."

Reitz was evidently in whole-hearted sympathy with "The Cottar's Saturday Night," though here too his work is in no sense a reproduction but an imitation. We miss the beautifully appropriate local colour of the original—the graphic scenery of the opening, the elder bairns drappin' in' and all the cackle of the clachan, the saintly sire's exhortation to well-doing and faithful service, the finesse of the blushing Jenny and the pawky gudewife, the artless love-making, the kindly Hawkie "'yont the hallan," and the specially Burns touch in deprecating the ensnarements of artless love. His gray-haired sire is the House-father, the Klein-baas (little Boss) of a patriarchal, self-contained establishment who has nothing to say of hard manual labour at the beck and call of a master, or of "service out amang the farmers roun," for there were none to hire on the Veldt.