at
the age of ten for the distant farm of Tirl, and did not return until
the old bellman's death, twenty years afterwards; but the first remark
he overheard on entering the kirkwynd was a conjecture flung across the
street by a grey-haired crone, that he would be "little Snecky come to
bury auld Snecky."

The father had a reputation in his day for "crying" crimes he was
suspected of having committed himself, but the Snecky I knew had too
high a sense of his own importance for that. On great occasions, such
as the loss of little Davy Dundas, or when a tattie roup had to be
cried, he was even offensively inflated; but ordinary announcements,
such as the approach of a flying stationer, the roup of a deceased
weaver's loom, or the arrival in Thrums of a cart-load of fine "kebec"
cheeses, he treated as the merest trifles. I see still the bent legs
of the snuffy old man straightening to the tinkle of his bell, and the
smirk with which he let the curious populace gather round him. In one
hand he ostentatiously displayed the paper on which what he had to cry
was written, but, like the minister, he scorned to "read." With the
bell carefully tucked under his oxter he gave forth his news in a
rasping voice that broke now and again into a squeal. Though Scotch in
his unofficial conversation, he was believed to deliver himself on
public occasions in the finest English. When trotting from place to
place with his news he carried his bell by the tongue as cautiously as
if it were a flagon of milk.

Snecky never allowed himself to degenerate into a mere machine. His
proclamations were provided by those who employed him, but his soul was
his own. Having cried a potato roup he would sometimes add a word of
warning, such as, "I wudna advise ye, lads, to hae onything to do wi'
thae tatties; they're diseased." Once, just before the cattle market,
he was sent round by a local laird to announce that any drover found
taking the short cut to the hill through the grounds of Muckle Plowy
would be prosecuted to the utmost limits of the law. The people were
aghast. "Hoots, lads," Snecky said; "dinna fash yoursels. It's juist
a haver o' the grieve's." One of Hobart's ways of striking terror into
evil-doers was to announce, when crying a crime, that he himself knew
perfectly well who the culprit was. "I see him brawly," he would say,
"standing afore me, an' if he disna instantly mak retribution, I am
determined this very day to mak a