The only rational answers I got were two; one of them, Geggie Trotter, a natural simpleton, told Tommy Staytape, "that, for part-payment, he would give me a prime leg of mutton, as he had killed his sow last week."--And what, said I to Benjie, did Jacob Truff the gravedigger tell ye by way of news? "He just bad me tell ye, faither, that hoo could ye expect he cou'd gie ye onything till the times grew better; as he hadna buried a living soul in the kirkyard for mair nor a fortnight." CHAPTER XXVI.--BENJIE ON THE CARPET. It's no in titles, nor in rank-- It's no in wealth, like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest; It's no in making muckle _mair_-- It's no in books--it's no in lear, To make us truly blest. BURNS. It is a most wonderful thing to the eye of a philosopher, to make observation how youth gets up, notwithstanding all the dunts and tumbles of infancy--to say nothing of the spaining-brash and the teeth-cutting; and to behold the visible changes that the course of a few years produces. Keep us all! it seemed but yesterday to me, when Benjie, a wee bit smout of a wean, with long linty locks and docked petticoats, toddled but and ben, with a coral gumstick tied round his waist with a bit knitten; and now, after he had been at Dominie Threshem's for four years, he had learned to read Barrie's Collection almost as well as the master could do for his lugs; and was up to all manner of accounts, from simple addition and the multiplication-table, even to vulgar fractions, and all the lave of them. At the yearly examination of the school-room by the Presbytery and Maister Wiggie, he aye sat at the head of the form, and never failed getting a clap on the head and a wheen carvies. They that are fathers will not wonder that this made me as proud as a peacock; but when they asked his name, and found whose son he was, then the matter seemed to cease being a business of wonder, as nobody could suppose that an only bairn, born to me in lawful wedlock, could be a dult. Folk's cleverness--at least I should think so--lies in their pows; and, that allowed, Benjie's was a gey droll one, being of the most remarkable sort of a shape ye ever saw; but, what is more to the purpose both here and hereafter, he was a real good-hearted callant, though as gleg as a hawk and as sharp as a needle. Everybody that had the smallest gumption prophesied that he would be a real clever one; nor could we grudge that we took pains in his rearing--he having been like a sucking-turkey, or a hot-house plant from far away, delicate in the constitution--when we saw that the debt was likely to be paid with bank-interest, and that, by his uncommon cleverality, the callant was to be a credit to our family.