ables to his own wife, was telling Irma all
about the prospects of his hay crop, and the bad look-out there was
along the Colvend shore owing to the rabbits breeding on the green hill
pastures.

"Oh, but I'll thin them, missie," he affirmed, in response to her look
of sympathy, "ow aye, there are waur things than hare soup and rabbit
pie. Marget" (his wife) "is a great hand at the pie. Ye maun come ower
some day and taste--you and your guidman. I will send ye word by that
daft loon Davie."

Then with hardly an effort, now that the ice was broken, turning to my
grandmother, "Eh, mistress, but it was awesome kind and mindfu' o' you
to fetch the laddie a Bible a' the road frae Enbra. I hae juist been
promising him a proper doing, a regular flailing if he doesna read in it
every nicht afore he says his prayers."

Needless to say Davie had promised--but as to Davie's after performance
no facts have been put on record. Still, he had his Bible and was proud
of it.

Then Irma, safe in her married state, would set herself down by some
shy, horny-fisted fellow, all nose and knuckles. She would draw him away
from his consciousness of the Adam's apple in his throat (which he
privately felt every one must be looking at) and give him a good
sympathetic quarter of an hour all to himself. She would smile and smile
and be a villain to her heart's content, till the lad's tongue would at
last be loosened, and he would tell how he tried for first prize at the
last ploughing match, and boast how he would have been first only for
his "coulter blunting on a muckle granite stane." He would relate with
exactness how many queys his father had, the records of mortality among
the wintering sheep, the favourable prospects of the spring
lambs--"abune the average--aye, I will not deny, clean abune the
average."

So he would sit and talk, and gaze and gaze, till there entered into his
soul the strong desire to work, to rise up and conquer fate and narrow
horizons--so that in time, like a certain Duncan MacAlpine (whom very
likely, as a big country fellow, he had thrashed at school), it might
happen to him to have by his fireside something dainty and sweet and
with great sympathetic eyes and a smile--_like that_!

We had only a little while of this, however, for on the morrow Louis was
to arrive from school, safely escorted by Freddy Esquillant and
half-a-dozen students, who had made a jovial party all the way from
Edinburgh.

Now I may write