What will you say there? Matters were by-and-bye settled full tosh between us, and though the means of both parties were small, we were young and able and willing to help one another. For two three days, I must confess, after Nanse and me found ourselves in the comfortable situation of man and wife I was a dowie and desponding, thinking we were to have a numerous small family and where work was to come from; but no sooner was my sign nailed up with four iron handfasts by Johnny Hammer, painted in black letters on a blue ground, with a picture of a jacket on one side and a pair of shears on the other, and my shop door opened to the public with a wheen ready-made waistcoats, gallowses, leather caps, and Kilmarnock cowls, hung up at the window, than business flowed in upon us in a perfect torrent. First one came in for his measure and then another. A wife came in for a pair of red worsted boots for her bairn, but would not take them for they had not blue fringes. A bare-headed lassie, hoping to be hansel, threw down twopence and asked tape at three yards a halfpenny. The minister sent an old black coat beneath his maid's arm, preened up in a towel, to get docked in the tails down into a jacket, which I trust I did to his entire satisfaction, making it fit to a hair. The duke's butler himself patronized me by sending me a coat which was all hair powder and pomate to get a new neck put to it. No wonder than we attracted customers, for our sign was the prettiest ye ever saw, though the jacket was not just so neatly painted as for some sand-blind creatures not to take it for a goose. I daresay there were fifty half-naked bairns glowering their een out of their heads at it from morning till night, and after they all were gone to their beds both Nanse and me found ourselves so proud of our new situation in life that we slipped out in the dark by ourselves and had a prime look at it with a lantern. MANSIE WAUCH'S FIRST AND LAST PLAY. Mony a time and often had I heard of play-acting and of players making themselves kings and queens, and saying a great many wonderful things, but I had never before an opportunity of making myself a witness to the truth of these hearsays. So Maister Glen, being as fu' of nonsense and as fain to have his curiosity gratified, we took upon us the stout resolution to gang ower thegither, he offering to treat me and I determined to run the risk of Maister Wiggie, our minister's rebuke, for the transgression, hoping it would make na lasting impression on his mind, being for the first and only time. Folks shouldna at a' times be ower scrupulous.