' the
roadside--ye're aye eat-eatin', ye bursen craitur ye!"

III

THE COURTSHIP OF TAMMOCK THACKANRAIP, AYRSHIREMAN

_The peats were brought, the fires were set,
While roared November's gale;
With unbound mirth the neighbours met
To speed the canty tale_.

A bask, dry November night at Drumquhat made us glad to gather in to the
goodwife's fire. I had been round the farm looking after the sheep.
Billy Beattie, a careless loon, was bringing in the kye. He was whacking
them over the rumps with a hazel. I came on him suddenly and changed the
direction of the hazel, which pleased my wife when I told her.

"The rackless young vaigabond," said she--"I'll rump him!"

"Bide ye, wife; I attended to that mysel'."

The minister had been over at Drumquhat in the afternoon, and the wife
had to tell me what he had said to her, and especially what she had said
to him. For my guidwife, when she has a fit of repentance and good
intentions, becomes exceedingly anxious--not about her own shortcomings,
but about mine. Then she confesses all my sins to the minister. Now, I
have telled her a score of times that this is no' bonnie, and me an
elder of twenty years' standing. But the minister kens her weakness. We
must all bear with the women-folk, even ministers, he says, for he is a
married man, an' kens.

"Guidman," she says, as soon as I got my nose by the door-cheek, "it was
an awsome peety that ye werena inby this afternoon. The minister was
graund on smokin'."

"Ay," said I; "had his brither in Liverpool sent him some guid stuff
that had never paid her Majesty's duty, as he did last year?"

"Hoots, haivers; I'll never believe that!" said she, scouring about the
kitchen and rubbing the dust out of odd corners that were clean aneuch
for the Duke of Buccleuch to take his "fower-oors" off. But that is the
way of the wife. They are queer cattle, wives--even the best of them.
Some day I shall write a book about them. It will be a book worth
buying. But the wife says that when I do, she will write a second volume
about men, that will make every married man in the parish sit up. And as
for me, I had better take a millstone about my neck and loup into the
depths of the mill-dam. That is what she says, and she is a woman of her
word. My book on wives is therefore "unavoidably delayed," as Maxwell
whiles says of his St. Mungo's letter, and capital reading it is.

"Hoots, haivers!" said the wife again. She can