request was then put in the following terms:—“Mrs Smytrie [on other occasions it was plain Tibbie], my mother has her compliments t’ye, and she wad be muckle obleeged for twa tippeny bricks (loaves), as there’s some folk come upon her to their four-hours that she didna expeck.” To the which Mrs Smytrie would answer, in the same cruelly tranquil voice, “Tell your mother, my woman, that she had better get her bread on the Sabbath night where she gets’t on the Saturday’t e’en,” well knowing all the while that the shop referred to was not open, and that there was no other besides her own in the whole village, or within ten miles round. Perhaps a child would come in for a halfpenny-worth of paper, namely, writing-paper; but Mrs Smytrie, mistaking the word, would set about the elaborate ceremony of weighing out what she supposed the required quantity of pepper. The boy would look on, not knowing what to think of it, till at last he was roused from his reverie by having a neat little conical parcel, with a twist at the point, presented to him instead of the roll of paper which he had expected. He would then murmur out, with a ludicrous mixture of stupidity and terror, “It was paper I was wanting;” at which the old widow would break out with the anticipated torrent of invective, “Hech! dyted thing, could ye no speak plainer? What for did ye let me be makin’ up the pepper for ye, and no tell me it was paper? Niff-naffin!” There was hardly any other house in the village in the least distinguished from its fellows. The most of them were occupied by a race of decent weavers—for this, indeed, was the staple employment of Daldaff. Through almost every lattice you heard the constant sound of the shuttle and lay, mixed with the voices of the honest operatives, as they sung at their work. In a preceding age, the village contained only three or four of this class of men, who employed themselves in weaving the homely woollen cloth and sheeting which were then used by the country people, being formed out of materials supplied immediately by themselves. But these kinds of manufacture had, in a great measure, given way in favour of the lighter _fabrics_ of Glasgow. Cottons were now supplied from that immense mart, to be woven into showy webs; and as the trade offered far superior remuneration to what had ever been known in the village, not only the old serge-weavers had changed the one employment for the other, but a vast flock of their sons and connexions, and many of the country people around, had rushed into it, so that the primitive little village of Daldaff became neither more nor less than a kind of colony or dependency of the great western capital.