Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 22, 2025
She gave him soup till her ladle scraped against the bottom of the tureen; she cut for him the tenderest portions of the hen; she gave him most generously of cheese not the plain skim-milk curd cheese of Ladyfield, the leavings of the dairy, but the Saturday kebboch as it was called, made of the overnight and morning's milk, poured cream and all into the yearning-tub.
The men were on their way home over the New Bridge, treading heavily, and yet light-headed, for they had the Paymaster's dram at the "lifting" at Ladyfield in them, and the Paymaster himself was narrating to old Rixa, the Sheriff, and Donacha Breck his story, told a hundred times before, of Long Dan MacIntyre, who never came up past the New Bridge, except at the tail of a funeral, for fear the weight should some day bring the massive masonry down.
He was a boy with a timid and wondering eye, a type to be seen often in those parts, and his hair blew from under his bonnet, a toss of white and gold, as it blew below the helms of the old sea-rovers. He was from Ladyfield, hastening as I say with great news though common news enough of its kind the news that the goodwife of Ladyfield was dead.
But the summer made his station there in Ladyfield almost intolerable. For the roads, crisp, yellow, straight, demanded his going on them; the sun-dart among distant peaks revealed the width and glamour of the world. "Come away," said the breezes; passing gipsies all jangling with tins upon their backs awoke dreams poignant and compelling.
"I heard a forester sing 'Ben Dorain' last Hogmanay at home I mean in Ladyfield; he was not a good singer, and he forgot bits of the words here and there, but when he was singing it I saw the sun rise on the hill, not a slow grey, but suddenly in a smother of gold, and the hillside moved with deer. Birds whirred from the heather and the cuckoo was in the wood."
The same day at their meridian in the "Abercrombie" he broached the topic. "I'll tell you what it is, Captain: if that young fellow of yours is ever to earn salt for his kail, it is time he was taking a crook in his hand." "A crook in his hand?" said the Paymaster. "Would you have nothing else for him but a crook?" "Well," said MacGibbon, "I supposed you would be for putting him into Ladyfield.
"And where is he to stay now that his grandmother is dead?" The Paymaster drew up as if he had been shot, and swore warmly to himself. "Am not I the golan?" said he. "I forgot about the fellow, and I told the shepherd at Ladyfield to lock up the house till Whitsunday. I'm putting the poor boy out in the world without a roof for his head. It must be seen to, it must be seen to."
And by-and-by there came a regret for the things lost with the death of the little old woman of Ladyfield what they were his mind did not pause to make definite, but there was the sense of chances gone with no recalling, of a calm, of a solitude, of a more intimate communion with the animals of the wilds and the voices of the woods and hills.
"Come away in, I am proud to see you at my door." The Paymaster stepped in, still gripping the boy by the shoulder, but refused to sit down. He spoke very short and dry in his best travelled English. "Did you lock up the Ladyfield house as I told you?" he asked.
He had never had any thought as to how he should tell the Paymaster that the goodwife of Ladyfield was dead, that was a task he had expected to be left to some one else, but Jean Clerk and her sister had a cunning enough purpose in making him the bearer of the news. "I am to tell him the goodwife of Ladyfield is dead," he explained, stammering, to the Sergeant More. "Dead!" said John More.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking