Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/124

120 dreams therefore; they are the delusions of him who seeks to sink our souls. But bless thy God, and cherish thy child; keep his feet from the evil path, and his hand from the evil thing, and his tongue from uttering foolishness; and the boy shall become a stripling, and the stripling a man, wise in all his ways, and renowned in his generation, and thou shalt rejoice with abundance of joy."

While this devout person cheered my heart with his counsel, he was not unheard of those two foolish women; they liked not the wisdom of his words, nor his sayings concerning themselves, and they began with a fierce and sudden outcry, "A pretty elder, indeed," said the woman of the Rowantree-burn, "to come here in the shades and darkness of night to expound dreams to a rosy young widow. I'll warrant he would not care if the man-child were at the bottom of the Ladye's Lowe, so long as a full farm, a well-plenished house, and a loving dame in lily-white linen were to the fore. I wish I were a real witch for his sake, he should dree a kittle cast." The words of the mariner's wife chimed in with those of her antagonist. "A pretty elder, truly," said she, smiting her hands together close to his nose; "he'll come here to talk of sinful dreams, and flutes and dulcimers, and shaking of wanton legs, and the smiling of ensnaring eyes. And yet should the bairn of a poor body have a fairer look than ane's ain husband, he will threaten us with kirk censure and session rebuke, though it's weel kenned that mothers cannot command the complexion of their babes nor control the time when it pleases Providence to send them weeping into the world. There was my ain son Samuel; his father had sailed but ten months and a day when the sweet wean came; where was the marvel of that? If there was not an indulgence, and acts of wondrous bounty and kindness, and blessings in the shape of babes showered upon mariners, sorrowful would their lives be, dwelling so far from their wives in the deep wide waters.'

"Woman, woman," said the elder, "I came not hither to hearken to thy confession; go home and repent, and leave me to admonish the owner of this house, touching the dream with which her spirit is sorely troubled." "Admonish!" said the mariner's spouse, "I dare ye, sir, to use that word of scorn and kirk scandal to the widow of as douce a man as ever stepped in a black-leather shoe. Admonish, indeed! If ye are so full of the gracious spirit of counsel and