United States or Palau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The very men the dear craturs feed, and clothe, and protect, and cherish, sing in the pot-houses that they want their liberty 'Becaus their wifis hes maistery, That they dar nawayis cheip; Bot gif it be in privity, Quhan thair wifis are in sleip.
"On Mayday," says King James, "when everybody is bound to Peblis to the play," "At Beltane quhan ilke bodie bownis To Peblis to the play, To heir the singing and sweit soundis, The solace suth to say. Be firth and forest furth they found, They graythit them full gay; God wot that wald they do that stound, For it was thair feist day They said Of Peblis to the Play."
"I hard, Mr. James Melvill," said the King, "that ye wreitt a Lettre to the Synod of Fyff at Cowper, quhairin was meikle of Chryst, but lytle guid of the King. Now, wes that a charitabill judgment of me?" "Sir," says Mr. James, with a low courtessie, "I wes baith seik and sair in bodie quhan I wreit that Lettre, bot sober and sound in mind.
Sometimes the good people made use of a straw, a blade of grass, or a fern, a further illustration of which is furnished by "The Witch of Fife:" "The first leet night, quhan the new moon set, Quhan all was douffe and mirk, We saddled our naigis wi' the moon-fern leif, And rode fra Kilmerrin kirk.
The simplest calculation, had she cared to make it, would have shown her the utter futility of hoping to live on the munificent wage which a grateful country allowed to M'Gugan, less certain deductions for M'Gugan's slops and contingent sick-benefit, in return for his aid in protecting it from its enemies; and almost any parish official could have told her, what she ought in reason to have known already, that she was no longer merely M'Gugan's wife, dependent upon his exertions for the bread she ate, but a Daughter of the State and own sister to thousands of women to whom the gang in its passage brought toil and poverty, tears and shame not, mark you, the shame of labour, if there be such a thing, but the bedraggled, gin-sodden shame of the street, or, in the scarce less dreadful alternative, the shame of the goodwife of the ballad who lamented her husband's absence because, worse luck, sundry of her bairns "were gotten quhan he was awa'."
Word Of The Day