Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/168

164 and, taking my unreluctant hand, she led me up to this producer of sounds, and guided his hand to my person. He felt my dress from head to heel, vowed by his bow he had never touched a garment of such rich device as my coat, swore by his fiddle my bonnet was worth all the money his instrument had ever earned, and hoped I would leave the land before I mined the mystery of thairms, for there was no need of instrumental mirth where I came. And dismissing me with a suppressed laugh, for open merriment might have diminished his evening's gain, he recommenced his music, and the discontinued dance began.

"My torment now commenced: the lasses danced round me in a ring. I had the misfortune to be so much in request that I was never off the floor: though I danced six-and-thirty reels without let or pause, and though the drops fell from my brows like rain, I saw no end to such perpetual capering. This ridiculous exertion is still remembered among the dames of Annandale; and I lately heard a girl reproach her lover with his listlessness for mirth, saying, 'When will ye dance six-and-thirty reels like daft John Ochiltree?' I grew an inch taller with this proof of my fame. All this was to come to an end. The blind fiddler had been smit in his youth with the disease of tune-making: he had mingled the notes of half a dozen tunes together, from which he extracted a kind of musical square root, and this singular progeny he was desirous of baptizing: much, it seems, depends on having a fine sounding name. At present he was hesitating between 'Prince Charles's Delight' or 'Duke William's Welcome,' when a peasant demanded the tune: 'the new tune, the plague on't—the tune without a name.' 'A tune without a name,' said a girl, 'cannot ye christen it, man? Here, fiddler, play up "Honest Man John Ochiltree. A shout of laughter succeeded. 'A name, by my faith,' exclaimed many voices at once; and the new name was shouted by a hundred tongues, to the infinite mortification of the fiddler and me: our vanity was wounded. The name of the tune was fixed as unalterably as the laws of the Medes, and from that hour forward it haunted me through life; while the popularity of the air was increased by the noises which a rustic minstrel soon caused to jingle in rude chorus to the air. Thus I got the name of 'Honest Man John Ochiltree,' and the story was a winter's laugh to the parish.