Spare Hours. Brown John
hand, and said he would call again in the morning. He could get no information about her from the neighbors; they were surly or asleep.
When he returned next morning, the little girl met him at the stair-head, and said, “She’s deid.” He went in, and found that it was true; there she lay, the fire out, her face placid, and the likeness to her maiden self restored. Hugh thought he would have known her now, even with those bright black eyes closed as they were, in æternum.
Seeking out a neighbor, he said he would like to bury Mary Duff, and arranged for the funeral with an undertaker in the close. Little seemed to be known of the poor outcast, except that she was a “licht,” or, as Solomon would have said, a “strange woman.” “Did she drink?” “Whiles.”
On the day of the funeral one or two residents in the close accompanied him to the Canongate Churchyard. He observed a decent looking little old woman watching them, and following at a distance, though the day was wet and bitter. After the grave was filled, and he had taken off his hat, as the men finished their business by putting on and slapping the sod, he saw this old woman remaining. She came up and, courtesying, said, “Ye wad ken that lass, sir?” “Yes; I knew her when she was young.” The woman then burst into tears, and told Hugh that she “keepit a bit shop at the Closemooth, and Mary dealt wi’ me, and aye paid reglar, and I was feared she was dead, for she had been a month awin’ me half-a-crown:” and then with a look and voice of awe, she told him how on the night he was sent for, and immediately after he had left, she had been awakened by some one in her room; and by her bright fire – for she was a bein, well-to-do body – she had seen the wasted dying creature, who came forward and said, “Wasn’t it half-a-crown?” “Yes.” “There it is,” and putting it under the bolster, vanished!
Alas for Mary Duff! her career had been a sad one since the day when she had stood side by side with Hugh at the wedding of their friends. Her father died not long after, and her mother supplanted her in the affections of the man to whom she had given her heart. The shock was overwhelming, and made home intolerable. Mary fled from it blighted and embittered, and after a life of shame and sorrow, crept into the corner of her wretched garret, to die deserted and alone; giving evidence in her latest act that honesty had survived amid the wreck of nearly every other virtue.
“My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
OUR DOGS
“The misery of keeping a dog, is his dying so soon; but to be sure, if he lived for fifty years, and then died, what would become of me?” —Sir Walter Scott.
“There is in every animal’s eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.” —Ruskin.
OUR DOGS
I was bitten severely by a little dog when with my mother at Moffat Wells, being then three years of age, and I have remained “bitten” ever since in the matter of dogs. I remember that little dog, and can at this moment not only recall my pain and terror – I have no doubt I was to blame – but also her face; and were I allowed to search among the shades in the cynic Elysian fields, I could pick her out still. All my life I have been familiar with these faithful creatures, making friends of them, and speaking to them; and the only time I ever addressed the public, about a year after being bitten, was at the farm of Kirklaw Hill, near Biggar, when the text, given out from an empty cart in which the ploughmen had placed me, was “Jacob’s dog,” and my entire sermon was as follows: – “Some say that Jacob had a black dog (the o very long), and some say that Jacob had a white dog, but I (imagine the presumption of four years!) say Jacob had a brown dog, and a brown dog it shall be.”
I had many intimacies from this time onwards – Bawtie, of the inn; Keeper, the carrier’s bull-terrier; Tiger, a huge tawny mastiff from Edinburgh, which I think must have been an uncle of Rab’s; all the sheep dogs at Callands – Spring, Mavis, Yarrow, Swallow, Cheviot, etc.; but it was not till I was at college, and my brother at the High School, that we possessed a dog.
Was the most utterly shabby, vulgar, mean-looking cur I ever beheld: in one word, a tyke. He had not one good feature except his teeth and eyes, and his bark, if that can be called a feature. He was not ugly enough to be interesting; his color black and white, his shape leggy and clumsy; altogether what Sydney Smith would have called an extraordinarily ordinary dog; and, as I have said, not even greatly ugly, or, as the Aberdonians have it, bonnie wi’ ill-fauredness. My brother William found him the centre of attraction to a multitude of small blackguards who were drowning him slowly in Lochend Loch, doing their best to lengthen out the process, and secure the greatest amount of fun with the nearest approach to death. Even then Toby showed his great intellect by pretending to be dead, and thus gaining time and an inspiration. William bought him for twopence, and as he had it not, the boys accompanied him to Pilrig Street, when I happened to meet him, and giving the twopence to the biggest boy, had the satisfaction of seeing a general engagement of much severity, during which the twopence disappeared; one penny going off with a very small and swift boy, and the other vanishing hopelessly into the grating of a drain.
Toby was for weeks in the house unbeknown to any one but ourselves two and the cook, and from my grandmother’s love of tidiness and hatred of dogs and of dirt, I believe she would have expelled “him whom we saved from drowning,” had not he, in his straightforward way, walked into my father’s bedroom one night when he was bathing his feet, and introduced himself with a wag of his tail, intimating a general willingness to be happy. My father laughed most heartily, and at last Toby, having got his way to his bare feet, and having begun to lick his soles and between his toes with his small rough tongue, my father gave such an unwonted shout of laughter, that we – grandmother, sisters, and all of us – went in. Grandmother might argue with all her energy and skill, but as surely as the pressure of Tom Jones’ infantile fist upon Mr. Allworthy’s forefinger undid all the arguments of his sister, so did Toby’s tongue and fun prove too many for grandmother’s eloquence. I somehow think Toby must have been up to all this, for I think he had a peculiar love for my father ever after, and regarded grandmother from that hour with a careful and cool eye.
Toby, when full grown, was a strong, coarse dog; coarse in shape, in countenance, in hair, and in manner. I used to think that, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, he must have been, or been going to be a Gilmerton carter. He was of the bull-terrier variety, coarsened through much mongrelism and a dubious and varied ancestry. His teeth were good, and he had a large skull, and a rich bark as of a dog three times his size, and a tail which I never saw equalled – indeed it was a tail per se; it was of immense girth and not short, equal throughout like a policeman’s baton; the machinery for working it was of great power, and acted in a way, as far as I have been able to discover, quite original. We called it his ruler.
When he wished to get into the house, he first whined gently, then growled, then gave a sharp bark, and then came a resounding, mighty stroke which shook the house; this, after much study and watching, we found was done by his bringing the entire length of his solid tail flat upon the door, with a sudden and vigorous stroke; it was quite a tour de force or a coup de queue, and he was perfect in it at once, his first bang authoritative, having been as masterly and telling as his last.
With all this inbred vulgar air, he was a dog of great moral excellence – affectionate, faithful, honest up to his light, with an odd humor as peculiar and as strong as his tail. My father, in his reserved way, was very fond of him, and there must have been very funny scenes with them, for we heard bursts of laughter issuing from his study when they two were by themselves; there was something in him that took that grave, beautiful, melancholy face. One can fancy him in the midst of his books, and sacred work and thoughts, pausing and looking at the secular Toby, who was looking out for a smile to begin