re was a pretty hell-broth brewing in the little town.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] _Hained gear_, saved money.

[5] That is for the stone of fourteen pounds. At that time Scotch cheese
was selling, _roughly_, at from fifty to sixty shillings the
hundred-weight.

CHAPTER XII.

"Ay, man, Templandmuir, it's you!" said Gourlay, coming forward with
great heartiness. "Ay, man, and how are ye? C'way into the parlour!"

"Good-evening, Mr. Gourlay," said the Templar. His manner was curiously
subdued.

Since his marriage there was a great change in the rubicund squireen.
Hitherto he had lived in sluttish comfort on his own land, content with
the little it brought in, and proud to be the friend of Gourlay, whom
everybody feared. If it ever dawned on his befuddled mind that Gourlay
turned the friendship to his own account, his vanity was flattered by
the prestige he acquired because of it. Like many another robustious big
toper, the Templar was a chicken at heart, and "to be in with Gourlay"
lent him a consequence that covered his deficiency. "Yes, I'm sleepy,"
he would yawn in Skeighan Mart; "I had a sederunt yestreen wi' John
Gourlay," and he would slap his boot with his riding-switch and feel
like a hero. "I know how it is, I know how it is!" Provost Connal of
Barbie used to cry; "Gourlay both courts and cowes him--first he courts
and then he cowes--and the Templar hasn't the courage to break it off!"
The Provost hit the mark.

But when the Templar married the miller's daughter of the Mill o' Blink
(a sad come-down, said foolish neighbours, for a Halliday of
Templandmuir) there was a sudden change about the laird. In our good
Scots proverb, "A miller's daughter has a shrill voice," and the new
leddy of Templandmuir ("a leddy she is!" said the frightened
housekeeper) justified the proverb. Her voice went with the skirl of an
east wind through the rat-riddled mansion of the Hallidays. She was
nine-and-twenty, and a birkie woman of nine-and-twenty can make a good
husband out of very unpromising material. The Templar wore a scared look
in those days and went home betimes. His cronies knew the fun was over
when they heard what happened to the great punchbowl--she made it a
swine-trough. It was the heirloom of a hundred years, and as much as a
man could carry with his arms out, a massive curio in stone; but to her
husband's plaint about its degradation, "Oh," she cried, "it'll never
know the difference! It's been used to swine!