only knew as a weaver and a poacher; a lank, long-armed
man, much bent from crouching in ditches whence he watched his snares.
To the young he was a romantic figure, because they saw him frequently
in the fields with his call-birds tempting siskins, yellow yites, and
linties to twigs which he had previously smeared with lime. He made
the lime from the tough roots of holly; sometimes from linseed oil,
which is boiled until thick, when it is taken out of the pot and drawn
and stretched with the hands like elastic. Gavin was also a famous
hare-snarer at a time when the ploughman looked upon this form of
poaching as his perquisite. The snare was of wire, so constructed that
the hare entangled itself the more when trying to escape, and it was
placed across the little roads through the fields to which hares
confine themselves, with a heavy stone attached to it by a string.
Once Gavin caught a toad (fox) instead of a hare, and did not discover
his mistake until it had him by the teeth. He was not able to weave
for two months. The grouse-netting was more lucrative and more
exciting, and women engaged in it with their husbands. It is told of
Gavin that he was on one occasion chased by a gamekeeper over moor and
hill for twenty miles, and that by and by when the one sank down
exhausted so did the other. They would sit fifty yards apart, glaring
at each other. The poacher eventually escaped. This, curious as it
may seem, is the man whose eloquence at the club has not been forgotten
in fifty years. "Thus did he stand," I have been told recently,
"exclaiming in language sublime that the soul shall bloom in immortal
youth through the ruin and wrack of time."

Another member read to the club an account of his journey to Lochnagar,
which was afterwards published in _Chambers's Journal_. He was
celebrated for his descriptions of scenery, and was not the only member
of the club whose essays got into print. More memorable perhaps was an
itinerant match-seller known to Thrums and the surrounding towns as the
literary spunk-seller. He was a wizened, shivering old man, often
bare-footed, wearing at the best a thin ragged coat that had been black
but was green-brown with age, and he made his spunks as well as sold
them. He brought Bacon and Adam Smith into Thrums, and he loved to
recite long screeds from Spenser, with a running commentary on the
versification and the luxuriance of the diction. Of Jamie's death I do
not care to