Brawly did I know, that it is a little after a laddie's being loosed from his mother's apron-string, and hurried from home, till the mind can make itself up to stay among fremit folk; or that the attention can be roused to anything said or done, however simple in the uptake. So, after Benjie brought Mungo home again, gey forfaughten and wearied-out like, I bade the wife give him his four-hours, and told him he might go to his bed as soon as he liked. Jealousing also, at the same time, that creatures brought up in the country have strange notions about them with respect to supernaturals--such as ghosts, brownies, fairies, and bogles--to say nothing of witches, warlocks, and evil-spirits, I made Benjie take off his clothes and lie down beside him, as I said, to keep him warm; but, in plain matter of fact (between friends), that the callant might sleep sounder, finding himself in a strange bed, and not very sure as to how the house stood as to the matter of a good name. Knowing by my own common sense, and from long experience of the ways of a wicked world, that there is nothing like industry, I went to Mungo's bedside in the morning, and wakened him betimes. Indeed, I'm leeing there--I need not call it wakening him--for Benjie told me, when he was supping his parritch out of his luggie at breakfast-time, that he never winked an eye all night, and that sometimes he heard him greeting to himself in the dark--such and so powerful is our love of home and the force of natural affection. Howsoever, as I was saying, I took him ben the house with me down to the workshop, where I had begun to cut out a pair of nankeen trowsers for a young lad that was to be married the week after to a servant-maid of Maister Wiggie's,--a trig quean, that afterwards made him a good wife, and the father of a numerous small family. Speaking of nankeen, I would advise every one, as a friend, to buy the Indian, and not the British kind--the expense of outlay being ill hained, even at sixpence a yard--the latter not standing the washing, but making a man's legs, at a distance, look like a yellow yorline.