ng, of course, but as soon
as I was imprisoned the fear of being kicked quenched all noise. I
hardly dared breathe. My only hope was in motionless silence. Imagine
the agony I endured! I did not steal any more of his flowers. He was a
good hard judge of boy nature.

I was in Peter's hands some time before this, when I was about two and
a half years old. The servant girl bathed us small folk before putting
us to bed. The smarting soapy scrubbings of the Saturday nights in
preparation for the Sabbath were particularly severe, and we all
dreaded them. My sister Sarah, the next older than me, wanted the
long-legged stool I was sitting on awaiting my turn, so she just
tipped me off. My chin struck on the edge of the bath-tub, and, as I
was talking at the time, my tongue happened to be in the way of my
teeth when they were closed by the blow, and a deep gash was cut on
the side of it, which bled profusely. Mother came running at the noise
I made, wrapped me up, put me in the servant girl's arms and told her
to run with me through the garden and out by a back way to Peter
Lawson to have something done to stop the bleeding. He simply pushed a
wad of cotton into my mouth after soaking it in some brown astringent
stuff, and told me to be sure to keep my mouth shut and all would soon
be well. Mother put me to bed, calmed my fears, and told me to lie
still and sleep like a gude bairn. But just as I was dropping off to
sleep I swallowed the bulky wad of medicated cotton and with it, as I
imagined, my tongue also. My screams over so great a loss brought
mother, darkest corners of the house, and oftentimes a long search
was required to find me. But after we were a few years older, we
enjoyed bathing with other boys as we wandered along the shore,
careful, however, not to get into a pool that had an invisible
boy-devouring monster at the bottom of it. Such pools, miniature
maelstroms, were called "sookin-in-goats" and were well known to most
of us. Nevertheless we never ventured into any pool on strange parts
of the coast before we had thrust a stick into it. If the stick were
not pulled out of our hands, we boldly entered and enjoyed plashing
and ducking long ere we had learned to swim.

One of our best playgrounds was the famous old Dunbar Castle, to which
King Edward fled after his defeat at Bannockburn. It was built more
than a thousand years ago, and though we knew little of its history,
we had heard many mysterious stories of t