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Updated: August 7, 2024
Jessie soon became skilled in the work of attending to the cows; and as for myself, I readily learned how to mend a gate, to dig potatoes, to look after the sheep, and even to follow the plough. Thus I busied myself until, in after-time, I was able to take to the sea. When the warm weather came round, the boys and girls of Andrew Drever's school were dismissed for their holidays.
"Ay, ay, just another minute, Jimmy," said Flett. Then turning to me again, he continued: "Weel, I'm just away up to Dominie Drever's. The dominie was aboard the Falcon just before the Clasper came in yestreen, and I saw him again after ye were brought here. He was up at Lyndardy this mornin' seeing your mother for information about all your movements these two days past.
Bergson, quoting Fabre, has made play with the supposed extraordinary accuracy of the solitary wasp Ammophila, which lays its eggs in a caterpillar. On this subject I will quote from Drever's "Instinct in Man," p. 92: "According to Fabre's observations, which Bergson accepts, the Ammophila stings its prey EXACTLY and UNERRINGLY in EACH of the nervous centres.
Andrew Drever had given these directions, and was leaning with his elbow on the desk, his chin resting on his hand, when his eye was attracted by my moving shadow at the doorway; and amid a sudden silence I entered and took my place at the bottom of the class. "Good morning, sir!" I said, looking fearlessly into Mr. Drever's kind face. "Good morning, Ericson!" said he.
"If it's danger you're wantin' the laddie to seek, he's seen o'er many dangers already, I'm thinking. It's nearly drowned he was, only a week ago, in the Barra Flow, swimming out after a dog that wasna worth the saving; and I have seen him mysel' dangling over the Breckness cliffs, like a spider, at the end of a rope I would not have trusted to hang Lucky Drever's cat with!
Andrew Drever's tender emotion grew into anger as he thought of the murderer of his pet jackdaw, and he paced the room vowing vengeance against his mother's cat, which had now escaped into comparative security on the top of the kitchen cupboard. "Come down here, ye wretch!" he exclaimed, taking up a knife from the table and holding it up threateningly. "Come down here, ye foul fiend.
Drever's school had been sound, and she could keep house as well as any fisherman's wife in Orkney, and row a boat as well as any lad. "Was it Halcro ye were seeking, Jessie?" asked old Grace, as though my sister's presence there was a matter of as little concern to her as the presence of the old German clock in the corner of the room. "Yea," said Jessie.
When I arrived at Andrew Drever's house there was no one moving within, but the door was not locked, and quietly lifting the latch I went inside to find the cat Baudrons, that I might take him out to the Lydia according to my promise. I made so little noise that even the jackdaw did not seem to notice my entrance, and I looked to his cage on the side table.
This illustrates how love of the marvellous may mislead even so careful an observer as Fabre and so eminent a philosopher as Bergson. In the same chapter of Dr. Drever's book there are some interesting examples of the mistakes made by instinct. I will quote one as a sample: "The larva of the Lomechusa beetle eats the young of the ants, in whose nest it is reared.
That night, as I sat at Andrew Drever's fireside talking of Jarl Haffling's talisman, Thora Quendale told us how, when one day after her illness she was sitting in an armchair, with the stone dangling by a string from her hand, she fell asleep before the warm fire. She was awakened by hearing a footstep in the room; it was Tom Kinlay's. She felt for the stone, but it was gone. Tom had stolen it.
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