for one of our name in the Book of
Martyrs, to make us proud of; but his search, I am free to confess, worse
than failed--as the only man of the name he could find out was a Sergeant
Jacob Wauch, that lost his lug and his left arm, fighting like a Russian
Turk against the godly, at the bloody battle of the Pentland Hills.

Auld granfaither died when I was a growing callant, some seven or eight
years old; yet I mind him full well; it being a curious thing how early
such matters take hold of one's memory. He was a straught, tall, old
man, with a shining bellpow, and reverend white locks hanging down about
his haffets; a Roman nose, and two cheeks blooming through the winter of
his long age like roses, when, poor body, he was sand-blind with
infirmity. In his latter days he was hardly able to crawl about alone;
but used to sit resting himself on the truff seat before our door,
leaning forward his head on his staff, and finding a kind of pleasure in
feeling the beams of God's own sun beaking on him. A blackbird, that he
had tamed, hung above his head in a whand-cage of my father's making; and
he had taken a pride in learning it to whistle two three turns of his own
favourite sang, "Oure the water to Charlie."

I recollect, as well as yesterday, that, on the Sundays, he wore a braid
bannet with a red worsted cherry on the top of it; and had a
single-breasted coat, square in the tails, of light Gilmerton blue, with
plaited white buttons, bigger than crown-pieces. His waistcoat was low
in the neck, and had flap pouches, wherein he kept his mull for rappee,
and his tobacco-box. To look at him, with his rig-and-fur Shetland hose
pulled up over his knees, and his big glancing buckles in his shoon,
sitting at our door-cheek, clean and tidy as he was kept, was just as if
one of the ancient patriarchs had been left on earth, to let succeeding
survivors witness a picture of hoary and venerable eld. Poor body, many
a bit Gibraltar-rock and gingerbread did he give to me, as he would pat
me on the head, and prophesy I would be a great man yet; and sing me bits
of old songs about the bloody times of the Rebellion, and Prince Charlie.
There was nothing that I liked so well as to hear him set a going with
his auld-warld stories and lilts; though my mother used sometimes to say,
"Wheest, granfaither, ye ken it's no canny to let out a word of thae
things; let byganes be byganes, and forgotten." He never liked to give
trouble, so a reb