your
bed on the back o' five o'clock. Think shame o' yoursel'!"

And Kit did.

He was informed on an average ten times a day that he was lazy, a
skulker, a burden on the world, and especially on the household of his
mother's cousin, Mistress MacWalter of Loch Spellanderie. So, being an
easy-minded boy, and moderately cheerful, he accepted the fact, and
shaped his life accordingly.

"Get up this instant, ye scoondrel!" came again the sharp voice. It was
speaking from under three ply of blankets, in the ceiled room beneath.
That is why it seemed a trifle more muffled than usual. It even sounded
kindly, but Kit Kennedy was not deceived. He knew better than that.

"Gin ye dinna be stirrin', I'll be up to ye wi' a stick!" cried Mistress
MacWalter.

It was a greyish, glimmering twilight when Kit Kennedy awoke. It seemed
such a short time since he went to bed, that he thought that surely his
aunt was calling him up the night before. Kit was not surprised. She had
married his uncle, and was capable of anything.

The moon, getting old, and yawning in the middle as if tired of being
out so late, set a crumbly horn past the edge of his little skylight.
Her straggling, pallid rays fell on something white on Kit's bed. He put
out his hand, and it went into a cold wreath of snow up to the wrist.

"Ouch!" said Kit Kennedy.

"I'm comin' to ye," repeated his aunt, "ye lazy, pampered
guid-for-naething! Dinna think I canna hear ye grumblin' and speakin'
ill words there!"

Yet all he had said was "Ouch!"--in the circumstances, a somewhat
natural remark.

Kit took the corner of the scanty coverlet and, with a well-accustomed
arm-sweep, sent the whole swirl of snow over the end of his bed, getting
across the side at the same time himself. He did not complain. All he
said, as he blew upon his hands and slapped them against his sides,
was--

"Michty, it'll be cauld at the turnip-pits this mornin'!"

It had been snowing in the night since Kit lay down, and the snow had
sifted in through the open tiles of the farmhouse of Loch Spellanderie.
That was nothing. It often did that. But sometimes it rained, and that
was worse. Yet Kit Kennedy did not much mind even that. He had a
cunning arrangement in old umbrellas and corn-sacks that could beat the
rain any day. Snow, in his own words, he did not give a "buckie"[5] for.

[Footnote 5: The fruit of the dog-rose is, when large and red, locally
called a "buckie."]

Then there was a s