fter much idiot
laughter, ruefully mingled with sighs, and groans, and tears, he is
suffered to mount upon a table, and urged, perhaps, by reckless folly to
give out a text from the Bible, which is nearly all engraven on his
memory--so much and so many other things effaced for ever--and there,
like a wild Itinerant, he stammers forth unintentional blasphemy, till
the liquor he has been allowed or instigated to swallow smites him
suddenly senseless, and, falling down, he is huddled off into a corner
of some lumber-room; and left to sleep--better far for such a wretch
were it to death.

Let us descend, then, from that most inclement front, into the lown
boundaries of the HOLM. The farm-steading covers a goodly portion of the
peninsula shaped by the burn, that here looks almost like a river. With
its outhouses it forms three sides of a square, and the fourth is
composed of a set of jolly stacks, that will keep the thrashing-machine
at work during all the winter. The interior of the square rejoices in a
glorious dunghill (O, breathe not the name!) that will cover every field
with luxuriant harvests--twelve bolls of oats to the acre. There the
cattle--oxen yet "lean, and lank, and brown as is the ribbed sea-sand,"
will, in a few months, eat themselves up, on straw and turnip, into
obesity. There turkeys walk demure--there geese waddle, and there the
feathery-legged king of Bantam struts among his seraglio, keeping pertly
aloof from double-combed Chanticleer, that squire of dames, crowing to
his partlets. There a cloud of pigeons often descends among the corny
chaff, and then whirrs off to the uplands. No chained mastiff looking
grimly from the kennel's mouth, but a set of cheerful and sagacious
collies are seen sitting on their hurdies, or "worrying ither in
diversion." A shaggy colt or two, and a brood mare, with a spice of
blood, and a foal at her heels, know their shed, and evidently are
favourites with the family. Out comes the master, a rosy-cheeked carle,
upwards of six feet high, broad-shouldered, with a blue bonnet and
velveteen breeches--a man not to be jostled on the crown o' the causey,
and a match for any horse-couper from Bewcastle, or gypsy from Yetholm.
But let us into the kitchen. There's the wife--a bit tidy body--and
pretty withal--more authoritative in her quiet demeanour than the most
tyrannical mere housekeeper that ever thumped a servant lass with the
beetle. These three are her daughters. First, Girzie