One evening in early autumn, when the sun, almost on the edge of the horizon, was shining right in at the end of one of the principal streets, filling its whole width with its glory of molten roses, all the shopkeepers were standing in their doors. Little groups of country people, bearing a curious relation to their own legs, were going in various directions across the square. Loud laughter, very much like animal noises, now and then invaded the ear; but the sound only rippled the wide lake of the silence. The air was perfumed with the scent of peat fires and the burning of weeds and potato-tops. There was no fountain to complete the harmony, but the intermittent gushes from the spout of the great pump in the centre of the square were no bad substitute. At all events, they supplied the sound of water, without which Nature's orchestra is not full. Wattie Sim, the watchmaker, long and lank, with grey bushy eyebrows meeting over his nose, wandered, with the gait of a heedless pair of compasses, across from his own shop to Redford the bookseller's, at whose door a small group was already gathered. "Well, Wattie," said Captain Clashmach, "how goes the world with you?" "Muckle the same's wi' yersel', Captain, and the doctor there," answered Wattie with a grin. "Whan the time's guid for ither fowk, it's but sae sae for you and me. I haena had a watch come in for a haill ook (week)." "Hoo de ye accoont for that, Mr Sim?" asked a shoemaker who stood near without belonging to the group. "It's the ile, man, the ile. Half the mischeef o' watches is the ile." "But I don't see," said the doctor, "how that can be, Sim." "Weel, ye see, sir," answered Wattie--and the words seemed somehow to have come tumbling silently down over the ridge of his nose, before he caught them in his mouth and articulated them--"ye see, sir, watches is delicat things. They're not to be traitet like fowk's insides wi' onything 'at comes first. Gin I cud jist get the middle half-pint oot o' the hert o' a hogsheid o' sperm ile, I wad I sud keep a' yer watches gaein like the verra universe. But it wad be an ill thing for me, ye ken. Sae maybe a' thing's for the best efter a'.--Noo, ye see, i' this het weather, the ile keeps fine an' saft, and disna clog the warks.--But losh preserves a'! What's that?"