Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/394

Rh Her staple industries partook somewhat of her general whimsicality. She was maker of rag carpets; renovator of expensive stockings, evolving, by processes of her own, two new pairs out of three old; and brewer of delectable treacle-beer. Her well-known scrupulous cleanliness (she nearly forfeited one of her best friends by washing her new flannel before making it up) long ensured her many customers.

Even her unconscious slips had a refreshing crispness about them. In those much earlier days of the original Free Church, when the rapid growth of its Sustentation Fund was the world’s admiration, she said, in vaunting the liberality of a cherished friend, ‘She never passes the church plate without putting in a fourpenny piece, though she hasna’ pit her name doon in the Ostentation Fund.’

For so grumpy a nature she was wonderfully tolerant of children, and if she kept an idol niche in her heart, it was certainly occupied by the boy whose childish pranks had most audaciously tormented her. In after years she made me the medium of many a quaint message to him, such as that ‘she prayed The Lion of the tribe of Judah to protect him from the lions in Japan.’

There may have been a humble romance lurking in the background of her life. One day near its close there came an old man some miles from the country to see her and say good-bye. She told me how she had tried to press sixpence into his hand, saying, ‘Hae John, there’s a sixpence I hae saved for you, to buy tobacco’; and he had replied, ‘Hoot, no! Kirsty, here’s a shilling I hae brocht for you to get tea.’ I don’t know whether the dear old souls thought it worth while to exchange tokens.

Her protracted illness seized her first out of doors, and for months she refused to be lifted into a bedstead, or to lie anywhere but on the floor. A kindly elder of her congregation lent her the mattress from his own bed and it was not reclaimed until his wife saw that his own mortal illness demanded its comfort. It was returned with, for thanks, the characteristic message that ‘it was no little she had suffered from the Knots (sounding the “K”) that were in it.’