I was loath to ride all the way after him to Auchendrayne, and so bethought me that I should get the loan of a laddie from my crony, Dominie Mure, out of his school at the foot of the Kirkwynd. My way led me by the Green, where it was sorely in my mind to try a stroke of the ball. But I remembered me that Sir Thomas bade me be soon back, that I might be ready to ride with him on the morrow’s morn to the town of Edinburgh by Duppil and the Ford of Holmestone. So, though I saw some brisk birkies licking at the ball, one of them being Laigh-nosed Jamie Crawford that had his nose flattened with the stroke of a golf ball on the hills of Ayr, I refrained me for that time and went to seek a boy. But I saw none on the Green, saving some raggedy loons playing kick-ball, whom I did not like to trust with so important a message. I went on, therefore, to the schoolhouse. And as I went it cheered me to think on Dominie Mure and his humours, for he and I had been gossips of a long season. The schoolhouse of Maybole was a curious building tacked on to the rear of the kirk, with vaulted passages of timber, in which were doors which could on occasion be opened, so that the school itself might be used as an addition to the kirk should the latter be crowded. But in my time the space was but seldom in demand. It was an age of iron, and men’s minds craved not naturally that which was peaceable and good. The old Papistry had passed away, but the new religion had not yet grown into the hearts of the people. I came to the schoolhouse door. The noise of conning lessons that used to go humming all along the Kirk Vennel was louder than it was wont to be. Indeed, I thought that of a surety Dominie Mure had gone as far as the change-house for his morning glass of strong waters, wherein I did that worthy man an injury. The dominie’s Highland pipes lay on the desk before him, the great drones looking out like eyes at the scholars. They were the recreation of his leisure, for he had been in his youth in the savage North, and had learned to be no ill-considered performer even in the country of pipes and pibrochs. I looked within, and there, mounted upon two desks and a chair, stood the Dominie with his head through a round hole in the boards of the roof, and all that one could see of him convulsed with animation. The bairns below were in a great consternation, crying out that this one and that other was misbehaving—that Robin Gibb was pinching, or that Towhead Kennedy was in the act of some piece of villainy which remained unexpressed, for the obvious reason that the heavy hand of Towhead Kennedy had prisoned the information within the mouth of the tale-bearer. The school of Maybole was an apartment nearly square, with a dark, well-hacked oaken writing-desk running round two sides of it, and benches set cross-ways on the floor, where, when the peace was undisturbed by internal war, the bairns conned their tasks from worn copies of the Bible.