United States or Lesotho ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I was named in this year for the General Assembly, and Mrs Balwhidder, by her continual thrift, having made our purse able to stand a shake against the wind, we resolved to go into Edinburgh in a creditable manner. Accordingly, in conjunct with Mrs Dalrymple, the lady of a major of that name, we hired the Irville chaise, and we put up in Glasgow, at the Black Boy, where we stayed all night.
The news came on a Saturday night, for we had no newspapers in those days, and was brought by Robin Modiwort, that fetched the letters from the Irville post.
Accordingly, as I have narrated, when I had passed a year over my 'prenticeship with Mr Remnant, I took up the corner shop at the Cross, facing the Tolbooth; and having had it adorned in a befitting manner, about a month before the summer fair thereafter, I opened it on that day, with an excellent assortment of goods, the best, both for taste and variety, that had ever been seen in the burgh of Gudetown; and the winter following, finding by my books that I was in a way to do so, I married my wife: she was daughter to Mrs Broderip, who kept the head inn in Irville, and by whose death, in the fall of the next year, we got a nest egg, that, without a vain pretension, I may say we have not failed to lay upon, and clock to some purpose.
Mrs Malcolm heard from time to time from her son Charles, on board the man-of-war the Avenger, where he was midshipman; and he had found a friend in the captain, that was just a father to him. Her second son, Robert, being out of his time at Irville, went to the Clyde to look for a berth, and was hired to go to Jamaica, in a ship called the Trooper.
The coal bark between Irville and Belfast, in which Robert Malcolm, the second son of his mother, was serving his time to be a sailor, got a charter, as it was called, to go with to Norway for deals, which grieved Mrs Malcolm to the very heart; for there was then no short cut by the canal, as now is, between the rivers of the Forth and Clyde, but every ship was obligated to go far away round by the Orkneys, which, although a voyage in the summer not overly dangerous, there being long days and short nights then, yet in the winter it was far otherwise, many vessels being frozen up in the Baltic till the spring; and there was a story told at the time, of an Irville bark coming home in the dead of the year, that lost her way altogether, and was supposed to have sailed north into utter darkness, for she was never more heard of: and many an awful thing was said of what the auld mariners about the shore thought concerning the crew of that misfortunate vessel.
She made for them a ball, to which she invited all the bonniest lassies, far and near, in the parish, and was out of the body with mirth, and had a fiddler from Irville; and it was thought by those that were there, that had she not been crippled with the rheumatics, she would have danced herself.
The steamer appeared at that time to have been about twelve miles off the land from Irville Point, and about four or five miles outside of Robben Island, and about seven miles from the barque. The steamer then came up to and alongside of the barque, when the latter was good four miles off the land at or near the old Lighthouse, and five miles off the Island. Captain Forsyth to Sir P. Wodehouse.
No doubt, it was his household ills that burdened him past bearing, and made him go into Irville, when he heard of the recruiting, and take on to be a soldier.
But the most memorable thing that befell among my people this year, was the burning of the lint-mill on the Lugton water, which happened, of all the days of the year, on the very selfsame day that Miss Girzie Gilchrist, better known as Lady Skimmilk, hired the chaise from Mrs Watts of the New Inns of Irville, to go with her brother, the major, to consult the faculty in Edinburgh concerning his complaints.
For this, poor Kate was not allowed ever to set her face in the Breadland again. When Charlie Malcolm had stayed about a week with his mother, he returned to his berth in the Tobacco trader, and shortly after his brother Robert was likewise sent to serve his time to the sea, with an owner that was master of his own bark, in the coal trade at Irville.
Word Of The Day