Gin e'er he marries ony.

'O gentle wind that bloweth south,
From where my love repaireth,
Convey a word from his dear mouth,
An' tell me how he fareth.'"

Chapter XV. Jane Grieve and her grievances.

'Gae tak' awa' the china plates,
Gae tak' them far frae me;
And bring to me a wooden dish,
It's that I'm best used wi'.
And tak' awa' thae siller spoons,
The like I ne'er did see,
And bring to me the horn cutties,
They're good eneugh for me.'

Earl Richard's Wedding.

The next day was one of the most cheerful and one of the most fatiguing
that I ever spent. Salemina and I moved every article of furniture
in our wee theekit hoosie from the place where it originally stood to
another and a better place: arguing, of course, over the precise spot
it should occupy, which was generally upstairs if the thing were already
down, or downstairs if it were already up. We hid all the more hideous
ornaments of the draper's wife, and folded away her most objectionable
tidies and table-covers, replacing them with our own pretty draperies.
There were only two pictures in the sitting-room, and as an artist I
would not have parted with them for worlds. The first was The Life of
a Fireman, which could only remind one of the explosion of a mammoth
tomato, and the other was The Spirit of Poetry calling Burns from the
Plough. Burns wore white knee-breeches, military boots, a splendid
waistcoat with lace ruffles, and carried a cocked hat. To have been
so dressed he must have known the Spirit was intending to come. The
plough-horse was a magnificent Arabian, whose tail swept the freshly
furrowed earth, while the Spirit of Poetry was issuing from a
practicable wigwam on the left, and was a lady of such ample dimensions
that no poet would have dared say 'no' when she called him.

The dining-room was blighted by framed photographs of the draper's
relations and the draper's wife's relations; all uniformly ugly. It
seems strange that married couples having the least beauty to bequeath
to their offspring should persist in having the largest families. These
ladies and gentlemen were too numerous to remove, so we obscured them
with trailing branches; reflecting that we only breakfasted in the room,
and the morning meal is easily digested when one lives in the open air.
We arranged flowers everywhere, and bought potted plants at a little
nursery hard by. We apportioned the bedrooms, givi