Neither could the step be called a great descent, when in mind and manners so many were nearly on one level. For instance, not only had Drumsheugh and Balcairnie been fellow-scholars at the same parish school, but another contemporary scholar was little Peggy Hedderwick, the daughter of a hedger-and-ditcher, who had brought her doubled-up scone and whang of cheese tied up in a napkin for her dinner at school, just as she had carried her father’s dinner daily when the field of his operations was within a girl’s walk from home. Peggy, though she was the junior of both the lads by some three to four years, had darted nimbly ahead, with the precociously quick wit of girls, in all learning, save sums. She had been ‘out of the Testament’ and ‘into Proverbs’ before either of the boys, and she had been such an expert in repeating the shorter catechism, from ‘man’s chief end’ to the Creed, without halt or blunder, that the master himself could not ‘fichle’ (puzzle) her. She had frequently coached her seniors and betters in that, to them, most difficult performance. As for the Psalms and Paraphrases, she could repeat them by heart in her shrill sing-song, till the master, though he was a licentiate of the Kirk, grew weary of hearing her. It was even seriously believed in the school that she had surmounted the Ass’s Bridge of the curriculum and could say right off, if anybody would stay to listen to her, the whole of the Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm. She could write a fine round hand, with an occasional clerkly flourish at the tail of a letter. It was at sums that Peggy hung her head. The multiplication table, with its barren chart of commercial details, unbrightened by a green spot on which fancy and sentiment could feed, had brought her to grief, and taken the pride of intellect out of the white-headed lassie. The lads who came through this test triumphantly had tried to help her in turn. But it was in vain--poor Peggy would never make even a decent arithmetician. It must only be by counting her fingers that she could ever reckon her earnings and her spendings.