fortnight."

CHAPTER XXVI.--BENJIE ON THE CARPET.

It's no in titles, nor in rank--
It's no in wealth, like Lon'on bank,
To purchase peace and rest;
It's no in making muckle _mair_--
It's no in books--it's no in lear,
To make us truly blest.

BURNS.

It is a most wonderful thing to the eye of a philosopher, to make
observation how youth gets up, notwithstanding all the dunts and tumbles
of infancy--to say nothing of the spaining-brash and the teeth-cutting;
and to behold the visible changes that the course of a few years
produces. Keep us all! it seemed but yesterday to me, when Benjie, a wee
bit smout of a wean, with long linty locks and docked petticoats, toddled
but and ben, with a coral gumstick tied round his waist with a bit
knitten; and now, after he had been at Dominie Threshem's for four years,
he had learned to read Barrie's Collection almost as well as the master
could do for his lugs; and was up to all manner of accounts, from simple
addition and the multiplication-table, even to vulgar fractions, and all
the lave of them.

At the yearly examination of the school-room by the Presbytery and
Maister Wiggie, he aye sat at the head of the form, and never failed
getting a clap on the head and a wheen carvies. They that are fathers
will not wonder that this made me as proud as a peacock; but when they
asked his name, and found whose son he was, then the matter seemed to
cease being a business of wonder, as nobody could suppose that an only
bairn, born to me in lawful wedlock, could be a dult. Folk's
cleverness--at least I should think so--lies in their pows; and, that
allowed, Benjie's was a gey droll one, being of the most remarkable sort
of a shape ye ever saw; but, what is more to the purpose both here and
hereafter, he was a real good-hearted callant, though as gleg as a hawk
and as sharp as a needle. Everybody that had the smallest gumption
prophesied that he would be a real clever one; nor could we grudge that
we took pains in his rearing--he having been like a sucking-turkey, or a
hot-house plant from far away, delicate in the constitution--when we saw
that the debt was likely to be paid with bank-interest, and that, by his
uncommon cleverality, the callant was to be a credit to our family.

Many and long were the debates between his fond mother and me, what trade
we would breed him up to--for the matter now became serious, Benjie being
in his thirteenth year;