' night
is this of it! God forgive me for a daft wife!" So it befell, by good
management, that she was not only the first to begin these nocturnal
conversations, but invariably the first to break them off; so she
managed to retire and not to be dismissed.

3. _A Border Family_

Such an unequal intimacy has never been uncommon in Scotland, where the
clan spirit survives; where the servant tends to spend her life in the
same service, a help-meet at first, then a tyrant, and at last a
pensioner; where, besides, she is not necessarily destitute of the pride
of birth, but is, perhaps, like Kirstie, a connection of her master's,
and at least knows the legend of her own family, and may count kinship
with some illustrious dead. For that is the mark of the Scot of all
classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to
Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears,
good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the
dead even to the twentieth generation. No more characteristic instance
could be found than in the family of Kirstie Elliott. They were all, and
Kirstie the first of all, ready and eager to pour forth the particulars
of their genealogy, embellished with every detail that memory had handed
down or fancy fabricated; and, behold! from every ramification of that
tree there dangled a halter. The Elliotts themselves have had a
chequered history; but these Elliotts deduced, besides, from three of
the most unfortunate of the border clans--the Nicksons, the Ellwalds,
and the Crozers. One ancestor after another might be seen appearing a
moment out of the rain and the hill mist upon his furtive business,
speeding home, perhaps, with a paltry booty of lame horses and lean
kine, or squealing and dealing death in some moorland feud of the
ferrets and the wild cats. One after another closed his obscure
adventures in mid-air, triced up to the arm of the royal gibbet or the
Baron's dule-tree. For the rusty blunderbuss of Scots criminal justice,
which usually hurt nobody but jurymen, became a weapon of precision for
the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the Crozers. The exhilaration of their
exploits seemed to haunt the memories of their descendants alone, and
the shame to be forgotten. Pride glowed in their bosoms to publish their
relationship to "Andrew Ellwald of the Laverockstanes, called 'Unchancy
Dand,' who was justifeed wi' seeven mair of the same name at Jeddart in
the