"Weel," said Janet nodding her head sagely, "and so ye shud sit quiet in
the schule. Ye'll no be learning yer lessons if ye speak."
I went on sketching.
Janet is already being Macdonaldised. She accepts his authority without
question. Ellen and Jean are critical as yet, but in a week both will
have adapted themselves to the machine.
They wandered off to pluck flowers. I finished my sketch and hailed
them. Then they came to me and took my arms and we took the cows home.
In the evening I was mucking out the byre when Jim Jackson came for his
milk.
"Good morrow, sir," I called from the byre door, "you didn't happen to
see Mr. Thomson's elephant as you came up the road?"
He looked interested.
"Elephant?" he asked brightly.
"Yes. The white one; strayed away this afternoon from the chicken coop.
Have you seen it?"
"No," he said, "not the white one, but the grey one and the tiger are
sitting at the dyke-side down at the second gate. I gave the tiger a
turnip when I passed it."
"Good!" I cried, "always be kind to animals."
"Yes, sir," he said, and he glanced down to the second gate. I think
that he wouldn't have been very much surprised if he had seen a tiger
there. Jim has the power of make-believe developed strongly. A few weeks
ago he found a dead sparrow in the playground. He came to me and asked
for a coffin. I gave him a match-box and he lined the class up in twos
and led them with bared heads towards the grave he had dug. The four
foremost boys carried the coffin shoulder high.
Jim laid ropes over the grave and the coffin was lowered reverently. A
boy was just about to fill in the grave when Jim cried: "Hold on!" Then
he took a handful of earth and sprinkled it over the coffin saying:
"Dust to dust, and ashes to ashes."
I blew the Last Post over the grave afterwards. Jim was as serious as
could be; for the moment he seemed to think that he was burying his
brother.
When he had got his milk he came to the byre door and watched me work
for a little.
"Please, sir," he asked, "do you like that better than teaching?"
I told him that I didn't.
"I wish Mester Macdonald wud be a cattleman," he said fervently.
"Some folk might say that he is," I remarked.
"He gave me my licks the first mornin' he cam," he continued. "We got an
essay 'How I spent my holidays,' and I said that I was in France and
helped the Crown Prince to loot places. We quarrelled about how much we
should get each and I shot him. The Mester gave me three scuds for
tellin' lies."
"He would," I said grimly.
"But you used to tell me to tell lies!" he cried.
"I did, Jim. And you see the result.... I muck out a byre."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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