t seat with the
same precautions. Will'um, the eldest, has a gun, which customarily
stands behind the old eight-day clock; and he takes it with him to the
garden to shoot the blackbirds. Long before Will'um is ready to let
fly, the blackbirds have gone away; and so the gun is never, never
fired: but there is a determined look on Will'um's face when he returns
from the garden.

In the stormy days of his youth the old man had been a "Black Nib."
The Black Nibs were the persons who agitated against the French war;
and the public feeling against them ran strong and deep. In Thrums the
local Black Nibs were burned in effigy, and whenever they put their
heads out of doors they risked being stoned. Even where the
authorities were unprejudiced they were helpless to interfere; and as a
rule they were as bitter against the Black Nibs as the populace
themselves. Once the patriarch was running through the street with a
score of the enemy at his heels, and the bailie, opening his window,
shouted to them, "Stane the Black Nib oot o' the toon!"

When the patriarch was a young man he was a follower of pleasure. This
is the one thing about him that his family have never been able to
understand. A solemn stroll through the kirkyard was not sufficient
relaxation in those riotous times, after a hard day at the loom; and he
rarely lost a chance of going to see a man hanged. There was a good
deal of hanging in those days; and yet the authorities had an ugly way
of reprieving condemned men on whom the sightseers had been counting.
An air of gloom would gather on my old friend's countenance when he
told how he and his contemporaries in Thrums trudged every Saturday for
six weeks to the county town, many miles distant, to witness the
execution of some criminal in whom they had a local interest, and who,
after disappointing them again and again, was said to have been bought
off by a friend. His crime had been stolen entrance into a house in
Thrums by the chimney, with intent to rob; and, though this
old-fashioned family did not see it, not the least noticeable incident
in the scrimmage that followed was the prudence of the canny housewife.
When she saw the legs coming down the lum, she rushed to the kail-pot
which was on the fire and put on the lid. She confessed that this was
not done to prevent the visitor's scalding himself, but to save the
broth.

The old man was repeated in his three sons. They told his stories
precisely as h