Clergy -- Fiction; Love stories; Scotland -- Fiction
People up here will complain if I do not tell how I found the farmer
of Green Brae's fifty pounds. It is one of the best-remembered
incidents of the flood, and happened shortly after I got out of the
cornfield. A house rose suddenly before me, and I was hastening to it
when as suddenly three of its walls fell. Before my mind could give a
meaning to what my eyes told it, the water that had brought down the
house had lifted me off my feet and flung me among waves. That would
have been the last of the dominie had I not struck against a chest,
then halfway on its voyage to the sea. I think the lid gave way under
me; but that is surmise, for from the time the house fell till I was
on the river in a kist that was like to be my coffin, is almost a
blank. After what may have been but a short journey, though I had time
in it to say my prayers twice, we stopped, jammed among fallen trees;
and seeing a bank within reach, I tried to creep up it. In this there
would have been little difficulty had not the contents of the kist
caught in my feet and held on to them, like living things afraid of
being left behind. I let down my hands to disentangle my feet, but
failed; and then, grown desperate, I succeeded in reaching firm
ground, dragging I knew not what after me. It proved to be a
pillow-slip. Green Brae still shudders when I tell him that my first
impulse was to leave the pillow-slip unopened. However, I ripped it
up, for to undo the wet strings that had ravelled round my feet would
have wearied even a man with a needle to pick open the knots; and
among broken gimlets, the head of a grape, and other things no beggar
would have stolen, I found a tin canister containing fifty pounds.
Waster Lunny says that this should have made a religious man of Green
Brae, and it did to this extent, that he called the fall of the
cotter's house providential. Otherwise the cotter, at whose expense it
may be said the money was found, remains the more religious man of the
two.
At last I came to the Kelpie's brig, and I could have wept in joy (and
might have been better employed), when, like everything I saw on that
journey, it broke suddenly through the mist, and seemed to run at me
like a living monster. Next moment I ran back, for as I stepped upon
the bridge I saw that I had been about to walk into the air. What was
left of the Kelpie's brig ended in mid-stream. Instead of thanking God
for the light without which I should have gone abruptly to my death, I
sat down miserable and hopeless.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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