kind of muffled sound
as of hurrying steps, and, in a moment after, every door in the row was
torn open, and out bolted the inhabitants--here an old woman, halting
on a stick as she came, there a shoemaker, with last and awl in his
hands, here a tailor with his shears, and there a whole family of
several trades and ages. Every one rushed into the middle of the road,
turned right round and looked up. Then arose such a clamour of tongues,
that it broke on the still air like a storm.

"What's ado, Betty?" asked Alec of a decrepit old creature, bent almost
double with rheumatism, who was trying hard to see something or other
in the air or on the roof of her cottage.

But before she could speak, the answer came in another form, addressing
itself to his nose instead of his ears. For out of the cottages floated
clouds of smoke, pervading the air with a variety of scents--of burning
oak-bark, of burning leather-cuttings, of damp fire-wood and peat, of
the cooking of red herrings, of the boiling of porridge, of the baking
of oat-cake, &c., &c. Happily for all the inhabitants, "thae deevils o'
loons" had used no powder here.

But the old woman, looking round when Alec spoke, and seeing that he
was one of the obnoxious school-boys, broke out thus:

"Gang an' tak the divot (turf) aff o' my lum, Alec, there's a good
laad! Ye sudna play sic tricks on puir auld bodies like me, near
brackin' in twa wi' the rheumateeze. I'm jist greetin' wi' the reek i'
my auld een."

And as she spoke she wiped her eyes with her apron.

Alec did not wait to clear himself of an accusation so gently put, but
was on the roof of Luckie Lapp's cottage before she had finished her
appeal to his generosity. He took the "divot aff o' her lum" and
pitched it half way down the brae, at the back of the cottage. Then he
scrambled from one chimney to the other, and went on pitching the sods
down the hill. At length two of the inhabitants, who had climbed up at
the other end of the row, met him, and taking him for a repentant
sinner at best, made him prisoner, much to his amusement, and brought
him down, protesting that it was too bad of gentle-folk's sons to
persecute the poor in that way.

"I didn't do it," said Alec.

"Dinna lee," was the curt rejoinder.

"I'm no leein'."

"Wha did it, than?"

"I can guiss; an' it shanna happen again, gin I can help it."

"Tell's wha did it, than."

"I wonno say names."

"He's ane o' them."

"The foul thief ta