Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/246

222 house but you conduct yourself like a beast, and when Koos Tities goes with you, then it goes badly with you two." There is here the identical epithet Burns uses, skellem, Ger. Schelm. It has now quite dropped out of the Scots vernacular, but is preserved in Gaelic as sgeilm, boasting, prattling. The boozing in the change-house is done con amore. "Ee'n aânt, in plaas van huis toe gaan" (Sc. ane eenin, in place of hooss tae gang), Klaas tipples with his kêrels in die knijp, where we have a Dutch word that has been borrowed by the German students for their Bier-kneipen. The glass which he induces his mates to give him is een slag, still heard in the Scottish phrase, to "sloken (moisten) one's drouth" or thirst. So they "ge' oom Klaas oek nog een dop" (so they gie old Klaas still another swig). In dop we have a word once in familiar use in Scotland. One of the Lowther family, travelling from Carlisle to Edinburgh (1629), records in his Journall or diary how, on going to bed for the night at laird Pringle's on Gala Water, his host gave him a doup of ale, or, in his own Cumberland dialect, a noggin of beer. The word is applied also in Cape Dutch to an egg-shell, and implies anything deep and rounded. In illustration we have the cognate Ger. Topf, a cooking-pot, Eng. spinning-top, and in Scots and nearest to Cape Dutch, candle-doup or the conical end of a candle. The result of the conviviality was to render Klaas, in Boer phrase, "mooi hoenderkop," beautifully fowl-headed. This may only visualise the erratic action of the bewildered hen, well known to cyclists, or a brain disease which makes its feathered victim whirl round and round and then fall helpless. The word mooi (Lat. mollis, soft) is as useful an epithet to the Boer in the Boer taal as bonnie in Scots. Thus he applies it to a river, a horse, a woman (handsome vrouw).

Reitz weakly omits the strikingly human elements of the story—the miller, the smith, the woman in the kirk-toon "with a past," the "chuffie vintner" and his spouse, and above all the souter, immortal Bacchanal. But moralising attracts him, so he tackles his author's visualising of Pleasure thus: "Pleasure is like a young cucumber. If you pick it, it simply withers; or like a tortoise in his shell, as soon as you touch him, he pulls in his head." We have here two similes that appeal most strongly to the Afrikander—"een jong komkommer en een