beautiful clothes Messrs. Scribner have given it. Weighted with
"An Edinburgh Eleven" it would rest very comfortably in the mill dam,
but the publishers have reasons for its inclusion; among them, I
suspect, is a well-grounded fear that if I once began to hack and hew,
I should not stop until I had reduced the edition to two volumes. This
juvenile effort is a field of prickles into which none may be advised
to penetrate--I made the attempt lately in cold blood and came back
shuddering, but I had read enough to have the profoundest reason for
declining to tell what the book is about. And yet I have a sentimental
interest in "Better Dead," for it was my first--published when I had
small hope of getting any one to accept the Scotch--and there was a
week when I loved to carry it in my pocket and did not think it dead
weight. Once I almost saw it find a purchaser. She was a pretty girl
and it lay on a bookstall, and she read some pages and smiled, and then
retired, and came back and began another chapter. Several times she
did this, and I stood in the background trembling with hope and fear.
At last she went away without the book, but I am still of opinion that,
had it been just a little bit better, she would have bought it.

CONTENTS

I. THE SCHOOLHOUSE
II. THRUMS
III. THE AULD LICHT KIRK
IV. LADS AND LASSES
V. THE AULD LICHTS IN ARMS
VI. THE OLD DOMINIE
VII. CREE QUEERY AND MYSY DROLLY
VIII. THE COURTING OF T'NOWHEAD'S BELL
IX. DAVIT LUNAN'S POLITICAL REMINISCENCES
X. A VERY OLD FAMILY
XI. LITTLE RATHIE'S "BURAL"
XII. A LITERARY CLUB

ILLUSTRATIONS

J. M. BARRIE . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

Sabbath at T'nowhead

AULD LIGHT IDYLLS

CHAPTER I

THE SCHOOLHOUSE

Early this morning I opened a window in my schoolhouse in the glen of
Quharity, awakened by the shivering of a starving sparrow against the
frosted glass. As the snowy sash creaked in my hand, he made off to
the water-spout that suspends its "tangles" of ice over a gaping tank,
and, rebounding from that, with a quiver of his little black breast,
bobbed through the network of wire and joined a few of his fellows in a
forlorn hop round the henhouse in search of food. Two days ago my
hilarious bantam-cock, saucy to the last, my cheeriest companion, was
found frozen in his own water-trough, the corn-saucer in three pieces
by his side. Since then I have taken the hens into the hou