he loaning; do you mind, ma'am?" asked the
draper. (We have long since discovered that this use of the verb is a
bequest from the Gaelic, in which there is no present tense. Man never
is, but always to be blessed, in that language, which in this particular
is not unlike old-fashioned Calvinism.)

We went out of the back door and down the green loaning, until we came
to the wee stone cottage in which the draper himself lives most of the
year, retiring for the warmer months to the back of his shop, and eking
out a comfortable income by renting his hearth-stone to the summer
visitor.

The thatched roof on the wing that formed the kitchen attracted my
artist's eye, and we went in to examine the interior, which we found
surprisingly attractive. There was a tiny sitting-room, with a fireplace
and a microscopic piano; a dining-room adorned with portraits of
relatives who looked nervous when they met my eye, for they knew that
they would be turned face to the wall on the morrow; four bedrooms, a
kitchen, and a back garden so filled with vegetables and flowers that we
exclaimed with astonishment and admiration.

"But we cannot keep house in Scotland," objected Salemina. "Think of the
care! And what about the servants?"

"Why not eat at the inn?" I suggested. "Think of living in a real
loaning, Salemina! Look at the stone floor in the kitchen, and the
adorable stuffy box-bed in the wall! Look at the bust of Sir Walter
in the hall, and the chromo of Melrose Abbey by moonlight! Look at the
lintel over the front door, with a ship, moon, stars, and 1602 carved in
the stone! What is food to all this?"

Salemina agreed that it was hardly worth considering; and in truth so
many landladies had refused to receive her as a tenant that day that her
spirits were rather low, and she was uncommonly flexible.

"It is the lintel and the back garden that rents the hoose," remarked
the draper complacently in broad Scotch that I cannot reproduce. He is a
house-agent as well as a draper, and went on to tell us that when he had
a cottage he could rent in no other way he planted plenty of creepers
in front of it. "The baker's hoose is no sae bonnie," he said, "and the
linen and cutlery verra scanty, but there is a yellow laburnum growin'
by the door: the leddies see that, and forget to ask aboot the linen. It
depends a good bit on the weather, too; it is easy to let a hoose when
the sun shines upon it."

"We hardly dare undertake regular house