Cleg grew more and more tired of the silence. It deafened him, so that
several times he had to go outside and yell at the top of his voice
simply, as it were, to relieve nature.
It happened that on the second occasion, as soon as he had finished
yelling—that is, exhausted an entire vocabulary of hideous sounds—a
train to Port Andrew broke the monotony. It did not actually stop,
because it was a passenger train and had already "watered up" at
Netherby. But Cleg was as pleased as if it had brought him a box of
apples. He climbed up and sat cross-legged on the top of the hut in his
sack, for all the world like an Indian idol; and the engine-driver was
so astonished that he forgot to put the brake on till he was thundering
headlong half way down the incline on the western side of the Summit
cabin.
But the stoker, a young man incapable of astonishment (as many of the
very young are), picked up a lump of coal from the tender and threw
it at Cleg with excellent aim. However, as the train was going slowly
uphill at the time, Cleg caught it and set the piece of coal between
his teeth. His aspect on this occasion was such as would fully have
warranted Auld Chairlie in setting him down not as a child of the
devil, but as the father of all the children of the devil.
The train passed, and Cleg was again in want of something to do. He
could not sit there in the sun, and be slowly roasted with a piece of
coal between his teeth, all for the benefit of the whaups. He thought
with regret how he should like to sit, just as he was, on some towering
pinnacle of the Scott monument where the police could not get him, and
make faces at all the envious keelies in Edinburgh. To do this through
all eternity would have afforded him much more pleasure than any
realisation of more contentional presentations of the joys of heaven.
He descended and looked about him.
At the end of the little cabin he found a pitcher of tar, but no brush.
He searched further, however, till he found it thrown carelessly
away among the heather. Whereupon Cleg forthwith appointed himself
house-painter-in-ordinary to the Port Andrew Railway Company, and
attacked the Summit cabin. He laid the tar on thick and good, so that
when the sun beat upon his handiwork it had the effect of raising
a smell which made Cleg's heart beat with the joy of reminiscence.
It reminded him of a thousand things—of the brickyard on blistering
afternoons, and also (when the perfume came most undiluted to his
nose) of that district of Fountainbridge which has the privilege of
standing upon the banks of the Forth and Clyde canal, and of containing
several highly respectable and well-connected glue factories. Cleg had
once gone there to "lag for a boy" who had offended his dignity by
"trapping" him at school in the spelling of the word "coffin."
Cleg had spelled it, simply and severely, "kofn."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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