d his
best work, some five hundred yards away from the edifice that was
reared in its stead. Now dismally fallen into disrepute, often indeed
a domicile for cattle, the ragged academy of Glen Quharity, where he
held despotic sway for nearly half a century, is falling to pieces
slowly in a howe that conceals it from the high road. Even in its best
scholastic days, when it sent barefooted lads to college who helped to
hasten the Disruption, it was but a pile of ungainly stones, such as
Scott's Black Dwarf flung together in a night, with holes in its broken
roof of thatch where the rain trickled through, and never with less
than two of its knotted little window-panes stopped with brown paper.
The twelve or twenty pupils of both sexes who constituted the
attendance sat at the two loose desks, which never fell unless you
leaned on them, with an eye on the corner of the earthen floor where
the worms came out, and on cold days they liked the wind to turn the
peat smoke into the room. One boy, who was supposed to wash it out,
got his education free for keeping the schoolhouse dirty, and the
others paid their way with peats, which they brought in their hands,
just as wealthier school-children carry books, and with pence which the
dominie collected regularly every Monday morning. The attendance on
Monday mornings was often small.

Once a year the dominie added to his income by holding cockfights in
the old school. This was at Yule, and the same practice held in the
parish school of Thrums. It must have been a strange sight. Every
male scholar was expected to bring a cock to the school, and to pay a
shilling to the dominie for the privilege of seeing it killed there.
The dominie was the master of the sports, assisted by the neighbouring
farmers, some of whom might be elders of the church. Three rounds were
fought. By the end of the first round all the cocks had fought, and
the victors were then pitted against each other. The cocks that
survived the second round were eligible for the third, and the dominie,
besides his shilling, got every cock killed. Sometimes, if all stories
be true, the spectators were fighting with each other before the third
round concluded.

The glen was but sparsely dotted with houses even in those days; a
number of them inhabited by farmer-weavers, who combined two trades and
just managed to live. One would have a plough, another a horse, and so
in Glen Quharity they helped each other. Withou