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"I houp it winna tak' awa' the brig." He meant the wooden bridge a few hundred yards below them, which, inaccessible from either side, was now very little above the level of the water. "It's jist the riggin' o' some cottar's bit hoosie," answered Thomas. "What's come o' them that was aneath it, the Lord only kens. The water's jist liftit the roof bodily. There it gangs throu' aneath the brig.
But he couldn't bear the disgrace of leaving his service like that. Nils had his own clear notions of honour, handed down through many generations. A young man from a big farm could not behave like a lad from a cottar's holding. And then he hadn't been here long enough yet; Ovrebo had been sadly ill-managed before he came: it would take some years to bring it round again.
They could trust his "Cottar's Saturday Night;" they could believe that he spoke from his heart, when in deep anguish he cries to the God whom he had forgotten, while they would have turned with a distrustful sneer from the sermon of the sleek and comfortable minister, who in their eyes, however humbly born, had deserted his class, and gone over to the camp of the enemy, and the flesh-pots of Egypt.
It was long after that Burns described "The Cottar's Saturday Night"; but he was only describing a condition which was already in vogue, and which was having tremendous influence in England as well as in Scotland: "The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face, They, round the ingle, form a circle wide; The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace, The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride: His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside, His lyart haffets wearing thin an' bare; Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide, He wales a portion with judicious care, And 'Let us worship God! he says, with solemn air."
"Thank you, but I am quite able to manage it myself," he said, "I could not think of letting you put your hand to it." "I am not a fine lady," said the girl, with a little impatient movement of her brows, as if she had stamped her foot. "I am nothing but a cottar's lassie." "But then, how comes it that you speak as you do?" asked Ralph.
Peer opened his eyes. "Doing? Oh, I don't know. Look about me first of all. Then perhaps I may find a cottar's croft somewhere and settle down and marry a dairymaid. Here's luck!" The gardens were full now of people in light summer dress, and in the luminous evening a constant ripple of laughter and gay voices came up to them.
It was heaven's wull that in them he should transcend a' the minnesingers o' this warld. But they're too perfeckly beautifu' to be envied by mortal man therefore let his memory in them be hallowed for evermair. August, 1834. Shepherd. I was wrang in ever hintin ae word in disparagement o' Burn's Cottar's Saturday Night.
The three first names, Wilson's above all, must have been in any case distinguished; yet it is surely no derogation to some of the most exquisite rural sketches in "Christopher North's Recreations," to claim them as the intellectual foster-children of "The Cottar's Saturday Night."
To the "Jolly Beggars," so far as my memory serves me, he refers but once; and then only to remark on the "strange, not to say painful," circumstance that the same hand which wrote the "Cottar's Saturday Night" should have stooped to write the "Jolly Beggars."
When the battle was over, he said that he had already made them a Bridal March, one that would never go out of the family of Tingvold but woe to the girl, he added, whom it did not play to church as happy a bride as the cottar's daughter, Aslaug Haugen! And here again people talked of the influence of some mysterious evil power. So runs the story.
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