"Eh, lass, what sayest thou?" he crooned, looking down upon her with a tenderness rare to him with one of his children. "What sayest thou?" "I say that you and mother and all about this house have run out of your wits about this slip of a girl? I say that you may rue it when you have not a son to succeed you at the Kirk of the Covenant down by the Ford." The fleeting of a smile came over my grandfather's face, that quiet amusement which usually showed when my grandmother opposed her will to his, and when for once he did not mean to give in. "It's a sorrowful thing--a whole respectable household gone daft about a couple of strange children;" he let the words drop very slowly. "Specially I was distressed to hear of one who rose betimes to milk a cow, so that the cream would have time to rise on the morning's milk by their porridge time!" "Father," said Jen, "that was for the boy bairn. He has not been brought up like the rest of us, and he does not like warm milk with his porridge." "Doubtless--ah, doubtless," said William Lyon; "but if he is to bide with us, is it not spoiling him thus to give way to suchlike whims? He will have to learn some day, and when so good a time as now?" Aunt Jen, who knew she was being teased, kept silence, but the shoulder nearest my father had an indignant hump. "Wheesht, William," interposed grandmother good-naturedly, "if Jen rose betimes to get milk for the bairn, ye ken yoursel' that ye think the better of her for it. And so do I. Jen's not the first whose acts are kindlier than her principles." But Jen kept her thorns out and refused to be brought into the fold by flattery, till her father said, "Jen, have ye any of that fine homebrewed left, or did the lads drink it a' to their porridges? I'm a kennin' weary, and nothing refreshes me like that!" Jen felt the artfulness of this, nevertheless she could not help being touched. The care of the still-room was hers, because, though my grandmother could go through twice the work in the day that her daughter could, the brewing of the family small beer and other labours of the still-room were of too exact and methodical a nature for a headlong driver like Mary Lyon. My grandfather got his ale, of the sort just then beginning to be made--called "Jamaica," because a quantity of the cheap sugar refuse from the hogsheads was used in its production. In fact, it was the ancestor of the "treacle ale" of later years. But to the fabrication of this beverage, Jen added mysterious rites, during which the door of the still-room was locked, barred, and the keyhole blinded, while Eben and Rob, my uncles, stood without vainly asking for a taste, or simulating by their moans and cries the most utter lassitude and fatigue.