Clergy -- Fiction; Country life -- Scotland -- Fiction; Deception -- Fiction; Romanies -- Fiction; 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 half-way on its
voyage to the sea. I think the lid gave way tinder 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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