Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/182

178 "Like a brood of chickens when the hawk descends, so started, so fluttered, and so flew in all directions this meeting of rivals; the door seemed far too narrow for escape. Seven bounded over the stackyard dike, and three leaped over a quickset hedge six feet high; two ran down the middle of a cornfield, with half the dogs of the place pursuing them; and two, who were strangers, in the haste of escape, fairly leaped into a pond, or small lake, and made good their retreat by swimming to the opposite side. In one minute the clamorous hall of Hazelbank was as mute as a kirk at midnight. As I hastened to retreat with the others, a white hand twitched me cunningly by the sleeve, and pulled me aside into a little closet, where two very warm and ripe lips whispered close in my ear, 'Let the gowks flee, they know not the goose's quack from the eagle's cry; my father's far from home.' And, shutting the chamber-door as she spoke, my bonnie and discreet messenger added, 'My sister Bess is in her grand moods this night; she carries her head o'er high, and winna speak to ye, for the foolery of that silly sang. A pretty thing, to lose a weelfaured lad for the sake of an idle rhyme: sae bide with me; I am almost as tall as Bess is, and I'll be fifteen at midsummer.'

"And now," said this representative of the rustic name of Ochiltree, "I shall stay my narrative; feeling something of the distress of a traveller who comes to the shedlands of sundry roads, and knows not which one to elect; for the adventures which befell me were manifold, and seem in my sight all alike curious and important. But I cannot expect douce grey-headed folk will listen to the idle tales of youthful times. I might have made far more imposing stories of my misadventures among the maidens, for they are not unsusceptible of poetical embellishment; but I despise fictions, and laugh at 'the idly feigned poetic pains' of metre ballad-makers; I abide by the old proverb, 'truth tells aye best.

"Truth tells aye best indeed," re-echoed an ancient dame, as she sat by the hall fire, "and yet idle fictions and the embellishments—I think that's the word ye used—of a poetic fancy seem to flow off as glibly as the current of truth itself. Ah! thou auld-farrand ane, dost thou think to pass off the pleasant inventions of thy own fertile brain for the well-known tales of thy early courtship? Ah, my