Scotland -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
own horses proved the farmers' worst enemies, except in the cases where
these sagacious animals took matters into their own ordering and bolted
judiciously for their stables. The day was to Thrums.
Individual deeds of prowess were done that day. Of these not the least
fondly remembered by her descendants were those of the gallant matron
who pursued the most obnoxious farmer in the district even to his very
porch with heavy stones and opprobrious epithets. Once when he thought
he had left her far behind did he alight to draw breath and take a pinch
of snuff, and she was upon him like a flail. With a terror stricken cry
he leaped once more upon his horse and fled, but not without leaving his
snuff-box in the hands of the derisive enemy. Meggy has long gone to the
kirk-yard, but the snuff-mull is still preserved.
Some ugly cuts were given and received, and heads as well as ribs were
broken; but the townsmen's triumph was short-lived. The ringleaders were
whipped through the streets of Perth, as a warning to persons thinking
of taking the law into their own hands; and all the lasting consolation
they got was that, some time afterward, the chief witness against them,
the parish minister, met with a mysterious death. They said it was
evidently the hand of God; but some people looked suspiciously at them
when they said it.
CHAPTER VI.
THE OLD DOMINIE.
From the new cemetery, which is the highest point in Thrums, you just
fail to catch sight of the red school-house that nestles between two
bare trees, some five miles up the glen of Quharity. This was proved by
Davit Lunan, tinsmith, whom I have heard tell the story. It was in the
time when the cemetery gates were locked to keep the bodies of suicides
out, but men who cared to risk the consequences could get the coffin
over the high dyke and bury it themselves. Peter Lundy's coffin broke,
as one might say, into the church-yard in this way, Peter having hanged
himself in the Whunny wood when he saw that work he must. The general
feeling among the intimates of the deceased was expressed by Davit when
he said:
“It may do the crittur nae guid i' the tail o' the day, but he paid
for's bit o' ground, an' he's in's richt to occupy it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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