only really tender
thing I ever heard an Auld Licht lover say to his sweetheart was when
Gowrie's brother looked softly into Easie Tamson's eyes and whispered,
"Do you swite (sweat)?" Even then the effect was produced more by the
loving cast in Gowrie's eye than by the tenderness of the words
themselves.

The courtships were sometimes of long duration, but as soon as the
young man realized that he was courting he proposed. Cases were not
wanting in which he realized this for himself, but as a rule he had to
be told of it.

There were a few instances of weddings among the Auld Lichts that did
not take place on Friday. Betsy Munn's brother thought to assert his
two coal-carts, about which he was sinfully puffed up, by getting
married early in the week; but he was a pragmatical feckless body,
Jamie. The foreigner from York that Finny's grieve after disappointing
Bell Whamond took, sought to sow the seeds of strife by urging that
Friday was an unlucky day; and I remember how the minister, who was
always great in a crisis, nipped the bickering in the bud by adducing
the conclusive fact that he had been married on the sixth day of the
week himself. It was a judicious policy on Mr. Dishart's part to take
vigorous action at once and insist on the solemnization of the marriage
on a Friday or not at all, for he best kept superstition out of the
congregation by branding it as heresy. Perhaps the Auld Lichts were
only ignorant of the grieve's lass's theory because they had not
thought of it. Friday's claims, too, were incontrovertible; for the
Saturday's being a slack day gave the couple an opportunity to put
their but and ben in order, and on Sabbath they had a gay day of it,
three times at the kirk. The honeymoon over, the racket of the loom
began again on the Monday.

The natural politeness of the Allardice family gave me my invitation to
Tibbie's wedding. I was taking tea and cheese early one wintry
afternoon with the smith and his wife, when little Joey Todd in his
Sabbath clothes peered in at the passage, and then knocked primly at
the door. Andra forgot himself, and called out to him to come in by;
but Jess frowned him into silence, and hastily donning her black mutch,
received Willie on the threshold. Both halves of the door were open,
and the visitor had looked us over carefully before knocking; but he
had come with the compliments of Tibbie's mother, requesting the
pleasure of Jess and her man that evening