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"But I don't care two inions For political opinions, While I can stand my heavy and my quartern; For to drown dull care within, In baccy, beer, and gin, Is the prime of a working-tailor's fortin! "There's common sense for yer now; hand the pot here." I recollect nothing more of that day, except that I bent myself to my work with assiduity enough to earn praises from Crossthwaite.
"Let me be!" whack, whack-puff. "It does me gude, it does me gude!" puff, puff, puff whack. "I've been a bottling of it up for three years, come Whitsuntide!" whack, whack, whack while Mackaye and Crossthwaite stood coolly looking on, and the wife shut herself up in the side-room, and screamed "Murder!"
"Vara weel; then books I'll lend ye, after I've had a crack wi' Crossthwaite aboot ye, gin I find his opinion o' ye satisfactory. Come to me the day after to-morrow.
Crossthwaite would ask for nothing higher, than to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water to an establishment of associate workmen. But, alas! his fate is fixed for the New World; and mine, I verily believe, for sickness and the grave.
He's a nice young man to keep a cove's spirits up, and talk about 'a short life and a merry one. Here comes the heavy. Hand it here to take the taste of that fellow's talk out of my mouth." "Well, my young'un," recommenced my tormentor, "and how do you like your company?" "Leave the boy alone," growled Crossthwaite; "don't you see he's crying?" "Is that anything good to eat?
'The deil's amang the tailors' in gude earnest, as the sang says. There's Johnnie Crossthwaite kicked the Papist priest out o' his house yestreen. Puir ministers, it's ill times wi' them! They gang about keckling and screighing after the working men, like a hen that's hatched ducklings, when she sees them tak' the water. Little Dunkeld's coming to London sune, I'm thinking.
And my spirit, deep enough already, sank deeper still into sadness; and I felt myself alone on earth, and clung to Mackaye as to a father and a father indeed that old man was to me. But, in sorrow or in joy, I had to earn my bread; and so, too, had Crossthwaite, poor fellow!
Bitter, bitter were our thoughts, and bitter were our tears, as Crossthwaite and I stood watching that beloved face, now in death refined to a grandeur, to a youthful simplicity and delicacy, which we had never seen on it before calm and strong the square jaws set firm even in death the lower lip still clenched above the upper, as if in a divine indignation and everlasting protest, even in the grave, against the devourers of the earth.
"Nor do I, really," said Ralph, speaking out the inmost soul that is in every young man. As Ralph Peden sat looking at Winsome the thought came sometimes to him but not often "This is Allan Welsh's daughter, the daughter of the woman whom my father once loved, who lies so still under the green sod of Crossthwaite beneath the lea of Skiddaw."
My readers will perceive from what I have detailed, that I was not likely to get any positive ground of comfort from Crossthwaite; and from within myself there was daily less and less hope of any.
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