ing themselves high in the
heavens before they are on a level with Nether Drumley's farmland. In
shape it is almost a semicircle, but its size depends on you and the
maid. If she be with you, the Den is so large that you must rest here
and there; if you are after her boldly, you can dash to the Cuttle Well,
which was the trysting-place, in the time a stout man takes to lace his
boots; if you are of those self-conscious ones who look behind to see
whether jeering blades are following, you may crouch and wriggle your
way onward and not be with her in half an hour.

Old Petey had told Tommy that, on the whole, the greatest pleasure in
life on a Saturday evening is to put your back against a stile that
leads into the Den and rally the sweethearts as they go by. The lads,
when they see you, want to go round by the other stile, but the lasses
like it, and often the sport ends spiritedly with their giving you a
clout on the head.

Through the Den runs a tiny burn, and by its side is a pink path, dyed
this pretty color, perhaps, by the blushes the ladies leave behind them.
The burn as it passes the Cuttle Well, which stands higher and just out
of sight, leaps in vain to see who is making that cooing noise, and the
well, taking the spray for kisses, laughs all day at Romeo, who cannot
get up. Well is a name it must have given itself, for it is only a
spring in the bottom of a basinful of water, where it makes about as
much stir in the world as a minnow jumping at a fly. They say that if a
boy, by making a bowl of his hands, should suddenly carry off all the
water, a quick girl could thread her needle at the spring. But it is a
spring that will not wait a moment.

Men who have been lads in Thrums sometimes go back to it from London or
from across the seas, to look again at some battered little house and
feel the blasts of their bairnhood playing through the old wynds, and
they may take with them a foreign wife. They show her everything, except
the Cuttle Well; they often go there alone. The well is sacred to the
memory of first love. You may walk from the well to the round cemetery
in ten minutes. It is a common walk for those who go back.

First love is but a boy and girl playing at the Cuttle Well with a
bird's egg. They blow it on one summer evening in the long grass, and on
the next it is borne away on a coarse laugh, or it breaks beneath the
burden of a tear. And yet--I once saw an aged woman, a widow of many
years, cry