summer takes brakes full of
sportsmen and others past the top of my footpath, and I was always
light-hearted when Craigiebuckle's cart bore me into the din of Thrums.
I only once stayed during the whole of my holiday at the house on the
brae, but I knew its inmates for many years, including Jamie, the son,
who was a barber in London. Of their ancestry I never heard. With us
it was only some of the articles of furniture, or perhaps a snuff-mull,
that had a genealogical tree. In the house on the brae was a great
kettle, called the boiler, that was said to be fifty years old in the
days of Hendry's grandfather, of whom nothing more is known. Jess's
chair, which had carved arms and a seat stuffed with rags, had been
Snecky Hobart's father's before it was hers, and old Snecky bought it
at a roup in the Tenements. Jess's rarest possession was, perhaps, the
christening robe that even people at a distance came to borrow. Her
mother could count up a hundred persons who had been baptized in it.

Every one of the hundred, I believe, is dead, and even I cannot now
pick out Jess and Hendry's grave; but I heard recently that the
christening robe is still in use. It is strange that I should still be
left after so many changes, one of the three or four who can to-day
stand on the brae and point out Jess's window. The little window
commands the incline to the point where the brae suddenly jerks out of
sight in its climb down into the town. The steep path up the commonty
makes for this elbow of the brae, and thus, whichever way the traveller
takes, it is here that he comes first into sight of the window. Here,
too, those who go to the town from the south get their first glimpse of
Thrums.

Carts pass up and down the brae every few minutes, and there comes an
occasional gig. Seldom is the brae empty, for many live beyond the top
of it now, and men and women go by to their work, children to school or
play. Not one of the children I see from the window to-day is known to
me, and most of the men and women I only recognize by their likeness to
their parents. That sweet-faced old woman with the shawl on her
shoulders may be one of the girls who was playing at the game of
palaulays when Jamie stole into Thrums for the last time; the man who
is leaning on the commonty gate gathering breath for the last quarter
of the brae may, as a barefooted callant, have been one of those who
chased Cree Queery past the poor-house. I cannot say