Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/86

62 Douglas "wrocht gynnys" (the girns or nooses of the rabbitcatcher) "to tak geddis (pike) and salmonys, trowtis, elys, and als menownys." Here we have the familiar mennons (minnows) of the schoolboy. When Barbour tells how Bunnock, the husband-man, carried out his clever plan for capturing Lithgow Peel from the English while ostensibly leading his wain full of hay for the garrison, the whole scene is a lifelike presentment to a Lowland farmer who has kept to his vernacular. "Aucht men, in the body of the wain," should "with hay helyt be about," where helyt recalls the hool or covering of a bean and the hulls or clothes of Sartor Resartus. In Burns's "Hallowe'en," when the vision of "an out-lier quey" came between the widow Leezie and the moon, her heart "maist lap the hool" (she nearly "jumped out of her skin"). Compare the Orcadian—"My heart is oot o' hule." Then when Bunnock's wain was "set evenly betuix the chekis of the yett sae that men mycht spar (close and fasten) it na gat" (way), he "then hewyt in twa the soyme" or traces. Gregor's "Banffshire Glossary" shows this soyme still in use. "Fin thir wuz a crom (kink) in the sowm the gaadman geed (went) and raid (disentangled) it." In Caithness, late in last century, tenants had to furnish simmons, or ropes of heath for thatching purposes, to the laird. Skinner very aptly uses the word in his Epistle to a Ship Captain turned Farmer,—

In simmons the definite article has been added to the Norse sime, ropes of straw or bent. The oat straw used for making them was called "gloy." They were twisted with a "thrawcruck." There are innumerable touches of this kind in Barbour which stir up associations with vernacular—"ane Englishman that lay bekand him be a fyr," where the preposition, German bei, is used in its favourite sense, or "mycht na man se a wäer man" than Edward Bruce, where the epithet would be poorly rendered by sadder, or this greeting between Bruce and his men,—