d" eye.

I think Tommy was one of the few about my father's house who were really
fond of me, but perhaps that was mainly because he loathed aunt Bridget.
He used to call her the Big Woman, meaning that she was the master and
mistress of everything and everybody about the place. When he was told
of any special piece of her tyranny to servant or farmhand he used to
say: "Aw, well, she'll die for all"; and when he heard how she had
separated me from my mother, who had nothing else to love or live for,
he spat sideways out of his mouth and said:

"Our Big Woman is a wicked devil, I'm thinking, and I wouldn't trust
[shouldn't wonder] but she'll burn in hell."

What definite idea I attached to this denunciation I do not now recall,
but I remember that it impressed me deeply, and that many a night
afterwards, during the miserable half-hours before I fell asleep with my
head under the clothes in the cold bedroom over the hall to which (as
Nessy MacLeod had told me) the bad fairies came for bad children, I
repeated the strange words again and again.

Another compensation was the greater opportunity I had for cultivating
an acquaintance which I had recently made with the doctor's son, when he
came with his father on visits to my mother. As soon as the hoofs of the
horse were heard on the gravel, and before the bell could be rung, I
used to dart away on tiptoe, fly through the porch, climb into the gig
and help the boy to hold the reins while his father was upstairs.

This led to what I thought a great discovery. It was about my mother. I
had always known my mother was sick, but now I got a "skute" (as old
Tommy used to say) into the cause of her illness. It was a matter of
milk. The doctor's boy had heard his father saying so. If my mother
could only have milk morning, noon and night, every day and all day,
"there wouldn't be nothing the matter with her."

This, too, impressed me deeply, and the form it took in my mind was that
"mammy wasn't sed enough," a conclusion that gained colour from the fact
that I saw Betsy Beauty perched up in a high chair in the dining-room
twice or thrice a day, drinking nice warm milk fresh from the cow. We
had three cows, I remember, and to correct the mischief of my mother's
illness, I determined that henceforth she should not have merely more of
our milk--she should have all of it.

Losing no time in carrying my intentions into effect, I crept into the
dairy as soon as the dairymaid had br