Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/81

Rh said the maiden, laughing till the woods rang again; "daffin' will be scant when a lass seeks for't with such a world's wonder as thee. It sets thy mother's oldest son well to speak of daffin'." "I have climbed a higher tree and harried a richer nest," murmured the ploughman; "but what, in the name of patronage, have we here? Here's an abstract personification, as somebody called John Goudie the Cameronian, of old Willie Mackfen the pedlar—in the days of his youth." So saying, a crowd of lads and lasses surrounded my pack and me, and proceeded to examine and comment on my commodities with an absence of ceremony which would have vexed even a veteran traveller.

"As I shall answer for it," said one youth, "here's the very snood Jenny Birkwhistle lost amang Andrew Lorrance's broom." "And I protest," retorted the maiden, justly offended at this allusion to the emblem of maidenhood, "I protest, here's the wisest of all printed things—even 'A Groat's Worth of Wit for a Penny,' which thy mother longed to read ere she was lightened of thee. Thy father has much to answer for." A loud laugh told that truth was mingled with the wit of the maiden. Utter ruin seemed to wait on my affairs, when a woman, with a sour, sharp visage and a tongue that rang like a steel hammer on a smith's anvil, came up, and interposed. "Ye utterly castaway and graceless creatures, are ye making godless mirth on a green hillside?" said she, stretching forth her hands, garnished with long finger-nails, over the crowd—like a hawk over a brood of chickens; "is not this the day when patronage seeks to be mighty, and will prevail? Put yourselves, therefore, in array. The preaching man of Belial, with his red dragons, even now approaches the afflicted kirk of Bleeding Heart. Have ye not heard how they threaten to cast the cope-stone of the kirk into the deep sink, where our forefathers of yore threw the lady of Babylon and her painted and mitred minions? But it is ever this way. Ye would barter the soul's welfare for the body's folly. Ah!" said she to a young peasant, "what would Hezekiah Graneaway, thy devout grandfather, say, were he to see his descendant, on a day of trial like this, standing making mouths at a poor packman-lad, with a bevy of petticoated temptresses around him? Get along, I say, lest I tear those curled love-locks from thy temples. And as for thee, thou young money changer—thou dealer in maiden trickery and idle