mother as mild as milk and a father----"

"Well, what about the father--speak of the--um-um--father and he will
appear, I suppose!"

It was my grandfather who had come in, his face bronzed with the sun
and a friendly shaving tucked underneath his coat collar at the back,
witnessing that some one of his sons, in the labours of the pirn-mill,
had not remembered the first commandment with promise.

His wife removed it with a smile, and said, "I'll wager ye that was yon
rascal Rob. He is always at his tricks!"

"Well, what were you saying about me, old wife?" said grandfather,
looking at his wife with the quiet fondness that comes of half-a-century
of companionship.

"Only that Jen there had a will-o'-the-wisp of a temper and that I knew
not how she got it, for you only go about pouring oil upon the waters!"

"As to that, you know best, guidwife," he answered, smiling, "but I
think I have heard of a wife up about the Heathknowes, who in some
measure possesses the power of her unruly member. It is possible that
Jen there may have picked up a thorn or two from that side!"

William Lyon caught his daughter's ear.

"Eh, lass, what sayest thou?" he crooned, looking down upon her with a
tenderness rare to him with one of his children. "What sayest thou?"

"I say that you and mother and all about this house have run out of your
wits about this slip of a girl? I say that you may rue it when you have
not a son to succeed you at the Kirk of the Covenant down by the Ford."

The fleeting of a smile came over my grandfather's face, that quiet
amusement which usually showed when my grandmother opposed her will to
his, and when for once he did not mean to give in.

"It's a sorrowful thing--a whole respectable household gone daft about
a couple of strange children;" he let the words drop very slowly.
"Specially I was distressed to hear of one who rose betimes to milk a
cow, so that the cream would have time to rise on the morning's milk by
their porridge time!"

"Father," said Jen, "that was for the boy bairn. He has not been brought
up like the rest of us, and he does not like warm milk with his
porridge."

"Doubtless--ah, doubtless," said William Lyon; "but if he is to bide
with us, is it not spoiling him thus to give way to suchlike whims? He
will have to learn some day, and when so good a time as now?"

Aunt Jen, who knew she was being teased, kept silence, but the shoulder
nearest my father had an indignant hump.

"W