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In the days when the earliest collectable curios of the ingle side were being made by the village smith, and the local sculptor and mason were preparing the chimney corner and the mantelpiece to surround the fireplace, it was in front of the great open fire in the kitchen, before which the large joints were roasted, that the retainers of the baron and the landowner or lord of the manor assembled on winter nights.
Then and there I set off running over the moor, until I burst into the kitchen where my mother and father were sitting on either side of the ingle. "Mother," I cried, "I'm off for a soldier!" Had I said I was off for a burglar they could not have looked worse over it, for in those days among the decent canny country folks it was mostly the black sheep that were herded by the sergeant.
However, I could see no good reason for wishing their conversation less obviously absorbing, though Miss Elliott's insinuation that Mr. Ingle might deplore intrusion upon the interview had struck me as too definite to be altogether pleasing. Still, such matters could not discontent me with my solitude.
"Between the chair and the ingle, was a bay window overlooking one angle of the lawn, a side path connecting the back premises of the house with the drive, and a dense growth of evergreens, poplars, limes, and copper beeches, the branches of which were now weighed down beneath layer upon layer of snow.
When the show was over, it was late at night. 'It's no good your going away, when it's so late', said the king. 'The bear had best sleep here. 'Perhaps it might sleep in the ingle by the kitchen fire', said the captain.
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."
Coming out of the wet, dark night, it was pleasant to see the blazing ingle, the white-sanded floor, and the little round table holding some cold moor-cock and the pastry that he particularly liked. "Love is but cauldrife cheer, my lad," said Janet, "an' the breast o' a bird an' a raspberry tartlet will be nane out o' the way." David was of the same opinion.
Swen Brodie was the biggest man who had ever come to the mountains, men said, unless that honour went to one of the Seven who more than a half-century ago had perished with Gus Ingle. And even so Brodie kept the honour in his own blood, boasting that Ingle's giant companion, the worst of a bad lot, was his own father's father.
"Whisht! ye silly tawpie," said her father, "we have naething to do how they come by the bestial they sell be that atween them and their consciences. Aweel Take notice, Jenny, of that dour, stour-looking carle that sits by the cheek o' the ingle, and turns his back on a' men.
Strong, rough, and eminently straight, intolerant of contradiction and ready with words like blows, his unsympathetic side recalls rather the father of the Brontes on the wild Yorkshire moor than William Burness by the ingle of Mount Oliphant. Margaret Carlyle was in theological theory as strict as her husband, and for a time made more moan over the aberrations of her favourite son.
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