I’m coming to bide with you in Duncairn.

*

When they’d sold the furniture and paid off the debts there was barely a hundred and fifty pounds left, Segget took the matter through hand at the Arms, the news got about though both Chris and Ewan had been secret about it and never let on. But Segget would overhear what you said though you whispered the thing at the dead of night ten miles from a living soul in the hills. And it fair enjoyed itself at the news, God man! that was a right dight in the face for that sulky, stuck-up bitch at the Manse, her with her braw clothes and her proud-like ways, never greeting when her man died there in the pulpit, just as cool as though the childe were a load of swedes, not greeting even, or so ’twas said, when they burned the corp in there in Duncairn. And such a like funeral to give a minister, burning the man in a creamery!

And the Segget Provost, Hairy Hogg the sutor, said the thing was a judgment on the coarse brutes both, he never spoke ill of the dead, not him, but what had his forefather, the poet Burns, said?—

Ake Ogilvie the joiner was having a dram and he sneered real coarse: You and your Burns! The gawpus blethered a lot of stite afore they shovelled him into the earth and sent all the worms for a mile around as drunk as tinks at Paldy Fair. But I’m damned if he’d ever a tongue like yours. What ill did Robert Colquohoun ever do you —or his mistress either, I’d like to know, except to treat you as a human being?—B’God, they showed themselves soft enough there!

Alec the Provost’s son was in having a nip, he wanted to fight Ake Ogilvie for that, the coarse Bulgar of a joiner to curse that way at a poor old sod like the Provost his father. But the wife of the hotel-keeper was back of the bar, folk called her the Blaster and Blasphemer for short, she was awful against a bit curse now and then: and she nipped Alec short as a new-libbed calf. None of your cursings in here, she cried, I won’t have the Lord’s name taken in vain. Alec habbered he’d nothing against the Lord, it wasn’t Him he’d called a Bulgar, but the other one—and got in a soss, fairly upset at the Blaster’s glower. Folk thought her an interfering old runt, ay God! she’d find her custom go.

So the most in the bar took a taik to the door with their drams in their hands and sat on the steps and looked at the sky, evening in Spring, bonny the hills, the seven o’clock dirling down Segget High Brig, peesies out on the long flat field that went mounting up to the bend of the hills. You minded Colquohoun, how he’d haunt those hills, the temples of God the creature would call them, him that died in the pulpit preaching a sermon—fair heathen it was, ay, a judgment of God. And now this slip of a wife of his had less than a two hundred pounds to her name, living up there in one room, folk said, all by her lone now that her loon, Εwan (ay, a son by her first bit man) had gone to work in Duncairn toun. It just showed you what happened to proud-like dirt, she’d intended the loon for an education and a braw-like life in a pulpit, maybe, nothing to do but habber and haver and glower over a collar on back to front: and instead he’d be just a common working chap.