第35章

`Bless the king! Thou knowest what king I mean. May the crown sit long upon his head! As for that young man who has come among us to seek an earthly crown, we beseech Thee to take him to Thyself, and give him a crown of glory!'"

"Ah, what a pity the Bonnie Prince had not died after his meteor victory at Falkirk!" exclaimed Jean Dalziel, when we had finished laughing at Mr. Macdonald's story.

"Or at Culloden, `where, quenched in blood on the Muir of Drummossie, the star of the Stuarts sank forever,'" quoted the Dominie. "There is where his better self died; would that the young Chevalier had died with it! By the way, doctor, we must not sit here eating goodies and sipping tea until the dinner-hour, for these ladies have doubtless much to do for their flitting" (a pretty Scots word for `moving').

"We are quite ready for our flitting so far as packing is concerned," Salemina assured him. "Would that we were as ready in spirit! Miss Hamilton has even written her farewell poem, which I am sure she will read for the asking."

"She will read it without that formality," murmured Francesca. "She has lived and toiled only for this moment, and the poem is in her pocket."

"Delightful!" said the doctor flatteringly. "Has she favoured you already? Have you heard it, Miss Monroe?"

"Have we heard it!" ejaculated that young person. "We have heard nothing else all the morning! What you will take for local colour is nothing but our mental life-blood, which she has mercilessly drawn to stain her verses. We each tried to write a Scottish poem, and as Miss Hamilton's was better, or perhaps I might say less bad, than ours, we encouraged her to develop and finish it. I wanted to do an imitation of Lindsay's `Adieu, Edinburgh! thou heich triumphant town, Within whose bounds richt blithefull have I been! but it proved too difficult. Miss Hamilton's general idea was that we should write some verses in good plain English. Then we were to take out all the final g's, and indeed the final letters from all the words wherever it was possible, so that full, awful, call, ball, hall, and away should be fu', awfu', ca', ba', ha', an' awa'. This alone gives great charm and character to a poem; but we were also to change all words ending in ow into aw. This doesn't injure the verse, you see, as blaw and snaw rhyme just as well as blow and snow, beside bringing tears to the common eye with their poetic associations. Similarly, if we had daughter and slaughter, we were to write them dochter and slauchter, substituting in all cases doon, froon, goon, and toon, for down, frown gown, and town. Then we made a list of Scottish idols,--pet words, national institutions, stock phrases, beloved objects,--convinced if we could weave them in we should attain `atmosphere.' Here is the first list; it lengthened speedily: thistle, tartan, haar, haggis, kirk, claymore, parritch, broom, whin, sporran, whaup, plaid, scone, collops, whisky, mutch, cairngorm, oatmeal, brae, kilt, brose, heather. Salemina and I were too devoted to common-sense to succeed in this weaving process, so Penelope triumphed and won the first prize, both for that and also because she brought in a saying given us by Miss Dalziel, about the social classification of all Scotland into `the gentlemen of the North, men of the South, people of the West, fowk o' Fife, and the Paisley bodies.' We think that her success came chiefly from her writing the verses with a Scotch plaid lead-pencil. What effect the absorption of so much red, blue, and green paint will have I cannot fancy, but she ate off--and up--all the tartan glaze before finishing the poem; it had a wonderfully stimulating effect, but the end is not yet!"

Of course there was a chorus of laughter when the young wretch exhibited my battered pencil, bought in Princes Street yesterday, its gay Gordon tints sadly disfigured by the destroying tooth, not of Time, but of a bard in the throes of composition.