ERCHIE My Droll Friend By Hugh Foulis (Neil Munro) (The Looker-On) William Blackwood and Sons Edinburgh and London MCMIV [Illustration: 0008] [Illustration: 0009] PREFACE. The majority of the following chapters are selections from “Erchie” articles contributed to the pages of the ‘Glasgow Evening News’ during the past three years. A number of the sketches are now published for the first time. ERCHIE I INTRODUCTORY TO AN ODD CHARACTER |On Sundays he is the beadle of our church; at other times he Waits. In his ecclesiastical character there is a solemn dignity about his deportment that compels most of us to call him Mr MacPherson; in his secular hours, when passing the fruit at a city banquet, or when at the close of the repast he sweeps away the fragments of the dinner-rolls, and whisperingly expresses in your left ear a fervent hope that “ye’ve enjoyed your dinner,” he is simply Erchie. Once I forgot, deluded a moment into a Sunday train of thought by his reverent way of laying down a bottle of Pommery, and called him Mr MacPherson. He reproved me with a glance of his eye. “There’s nae Mr MacPhersons here,” said he afterwards; “at whit ye might call the social board I’m jist Erchie, or whiles Easy-gaun Erchie wi’ them that kens me langest. There’s sae mony folks in this world don’t like to hurt your feelings that if I was kent as Mr MacPherson on this kind o’ job I wadna mak’ enough to pay for starchin’ my shirts.” I suppose Mr MacPherson has been snibbing-in preachers in St Kentigern’s Kirk pulpit and then going for twenty minutes’ sleep in the vestry since the Disruption; and the more privileged citizens of Glasgow during two or three generations of public dinners have experienced the kindly ministrations of Erchie, whose proud motto is “A flet fit but a warm hert.” I think, however, I was the first to discover his long pent-up and precious strain of philosophy. On Saturday nights, in his office as beadle of St Kentigern’s, he lights the furnaces that take the chill off the Sunday devotions. I found him stoking the kirk fires one Saturday, not very much like a beadle in appearance, and much less like a waiter. It was what, in England, they call the festive season. “There’s mair nor guid preachin’ wanted to keep a kirk gaun,” said he; “if I was puttin’ as muckle dross on my fires as the Doctor whiles puts in his sermons, efter a Setturday at the gowf, ye wad see a bonny difference on the plate. But it’s nae odds-a beadle gets sma’ credit, though it’s him that keeps the kirk tosh and warm, and jist at that nice easy-osy temperature whaur even a gey cauldrife member o’ the congregation can tak’ his nap and no’ let his lozenge slip doon his throat for chitterin wi’ the cauld.”