e is so."

"Death must come to all," some one would waken up to murmur.

"Ay," Lang Tammas would reply, putting on the coping-stone, "in the
morning we are strong, and in the evening we are cut down."

"We are so, Tammas; ou ay, we are so; we're here the wan day an' gone
the neist."

"Little Rathie wasna a crittur I took till; no, I canna say he was,"
said Bowie Haggart, so called because his legs described a parabola,
"but he maks a very creeditable corp (corpse). I will say that for
him. It's wonderfu' hoo death improves a body. Ye cudna hae said as
Little Rathie was a weelfaured man when he was i' the flesh."

Bowie was the wright, and attended burials in his official capacity.
He had the gift of words to an uncommon degree, and I do not forget his
crushing blow at the reputation of the poet Burns, as delivered under
the auspices of the Thrums Literary Society. "I am of opeenion," said
Bowie, "that the works of Burns is of an immoral tendency. I have not
read them myself, but such is my opeenion."

"He was a queer stock, Little Rathie, michty queer," said Tammas
Haggart, Bowie's brother, who was a queer stock himself, but was not
aware of it; "but, ou, I'm thinkin' the wife had something to do wi't.
She was ill to manage, an' Little Rathie hadna the way o' the women.
He hadna the knack o' managin' them 's ye micht say--no, Little Rathie
hadna the knack."

"They're kittle cattle, the women," said the farmer of
Craigiebuckle--son of the Craigiebuckle mentioned elsewhere--a little
gloomily. "I've often thocht maiterimony is no onlike the lucky bags
th' auld wines has at the muckly. There's prizes an' blanks baith
inside, but, losh, ye're far frae sure what ye'll draw oot when ye put
in yer han'."

"Ou, weel," said Tammas, complacently, "there's truth in what ye say,
but the women can be managed if we have the knack."

"Some o' them," said Cragiebuckle, woefully.

"Ye had yer wark wi' the wife yersel, Tammas, so ye had," observed Lang
Tammas, unbending to suit his company.

"Ye're speakin' aboot the bit wife's bural," said Tammas Haggart, with
a chuckle, "ay, ay, that brocht her to reason."

Without much pressure Haggart retold a story known to the majority of
his hearers. He had not the "knack" of managing women apparently when
he married, for he and his gipsy wife "agreed ill thegither" at first.
Once Chirsty left him and took up her abode in a house just across the
wynd. Instead of routing her