y man!"

My grandfather had pointed out that the actual Lord Chancellor of the
moment was a bachelor, whereupon Aunt Jen retorted, "Aye, and doubtless
that's the reason. The poor body has nobody to do her duty by him!"

For these excellent reasons my Aunt Jen took a dislike to Mr. Wrighton
Poole (of the firm of Smart, Poole, and Smart, solicitors, Dumfries) at
the very first glance.

And yet, when he was introduced into the state parlour with the six
mahogany-backed, haircloth-seated chairs, the two narrow arm-chairs, the
four ugly mirrors, and the little wire basket full of odds and ends of
crockery and foreign coins--covered by the skin of a white blackbird,
found on the farm and prepared for stuffing--he looked a very dapper,
respectable, personable man. But my Aunt Jen would have none of his
compliments on the neatness of the house or the air of bien comfort that
everything about the farm had worn on his way thither.

She drew out a chair for him and indicated it with her hand.

"Bide there," she commanded, "till I fetch them that can speak wi' you!"
An office which, had she chosen, Jen was very highly qualified to
undertake, save for an early and deep-rooted conviction that business
matters had better be left to the dealing of man and man.

This belief, however, was not in the least that of my grandmother. She
would come in and sit down in the very middle of one of my grandfather's
most private bargainings with the people to whom he sold his spools and
"pirns." She had her say in everything, and she said it so easily and so
much as a matter of course that no one was ever offended.

Grandfather was at the mill and in consequence it was my grandmother who
entered from the dairy, still wiping her hands from the good, warm
buttermilk which had just rendered up its tale of butter. There was a
kind of capable and joyous fecundity about my grandmother, in spite of
her sharp tongue, her masterful ways, the strictness of her theology and
her old-fashioned theories, which seemed to produce an effect even on
inanimate things. So light and loving was her hand--the hand that had
loved (and smacked) many children, brooded over innumerable hatchings of
things domestic, tended whole byrefuls of cows, handled suckling lambs
with dead mothers lying up on the hill--aye, played the surgeon even to
robins with broken legs, for one of which she constructed a leg capable
of being strapped on, made it out of the whalebone of an old