rom the town-house, literature found a table with forms round
it in a tavern hard by, where the club, lopped of its most respectable
members, kept the blinds down and talked openly of Shakspeare. It was
a low-roofed room, with pieces of lime hanging from the ceiling and
peeling walls. The floor had a slope that tended to fling the debater
forward, and its boards, lying loose on an uneven foundation, rose and
looked at you as you crossed the room. In winter, when the meetings
were held regularly every fortnight, a fire of peat, sod, and dross lit
up the curious company who sat round the table shaking their heads over
Shelley's mysticism, or requiring to be called to order because they
would not wait their turn to deny an essayist's assertion that
Berkeley's style was superior to David Hume's. Davit Hume, they said,
and Watty Scott. Burns was simply referred to as Rob or Robbie.

There was little drinking at these meetings, for the members knew what
they were talking about, and your mind had to gallop to keep up with
the flow of reasoning. Thrums is rather a remarkable town. There are
scores and scores of houses in it that have sent their sons to college
(by what a struggle!), some to make their way to the front in their
professions, and others, perhaps, despite their broadcloth, never to be
a patch on their parents. In that literary club there were men of a
reading so wide and catholic that it might put some graduates of the
universities to shame, and of an intellect so keen that had it not had
a crook in it their fame would have crossed the county. Most of them
had but a thread-bare existence, for you weave slowly with a Wordsworth
open before you, and some were strange Bohemians (which does not do in
Thrums), yet others wandered into the world and compelled it to
recognize them. There is a London barrister whose father belonged to
the club. Not many years ago a man died on the staff of the _Times_,
who, when he was a weaver near Thrums, was one of the club's prominent
members. He taught himself shorthand by the light of a cruizey, and
got a post on a Perth paper, afterwards on the _Scotsman_ and the
_Witness_, and finally on the _Times_. Several other men of his type
had a history worth reading, but it is not for me to write. Yet I may
say that there is still at least one of the original members of the
club left behind in Thrums to whom some of the literary dandies might
lift their hats.

Gavin Ogilvy I