Perthshire in bygone days

JOHN WBIGHT. 145
Wright, could rely with implicit confidence that it would
never meet him on the street. Charles Lamb says, " If
you give a neighbour a friendly lift and twit him with it, he
owes you no gratitude, you have paid yourself although
your coin may not become current." No man ever needed
to accuse Mr. Wright of this. Whatever he did with his
purse, he kept his tongue on the peace establishment.
Mr. Wright was for many years the Rothschild of Crieff,
and all his movements carried influence with them.
Circumstances which in the case of a poor man would have
passed unheeded by, in his became historical facts. The
riches and the stolid eccentricity together, rendered
whatever he did or said of great importance, either as
amusing characteristics or as showing the whimsical sway
of uncounted wealth.
Thirty years ago, a widow woman of the name of Hodge,
kept a little grocery shop on the north side of the street,
a little east from " The Square." Her husband, William
Hodge, a miller with Mr. Caw of Millnab, had died and left
her in trouble, with an empty till and two bills current.
The first of these bills became due, — as bills will do, in spite
of all the counsels of wisdom and prudence — and Mrs.
Hodge had only £9 to meet a demand of £14. On the
night before the last day of grace, she counted her nine
notes nine times over, spreading them out one by one, then
squeezing them slidingly between her finger and thumb,
but no ! like " The bachelor of the Albany" they refused,
point blank, to increase. She looked again into her
threepenny day-book, "Two shillings due in Hill Wynd, ten
shillings at Alichmore, but what would that do ?" although
she got it; she went to her bed despairing. "Tired
nature's sweet restorer" would have nothing to say to her,
and she conjured up visions of bills and of Pate Smith and
the jail. When the morning sun beamed past the old
steeple and heavy feet began to tramp along the pavement,
she got up and counted her notes again — nine ; then she
took a slate and set down 14 in large figures, and 9 below,
and carefully deducting the less from the greater, 5 still
stood out against her. She took down her little shutters,
and a decent neighbour wife came in for half an ounce of
tobacco. The widow opened her mind to her, trying to
obtain relief. "If I were you," said the neighbour, "I
would ask the len' o't frae Mr. Wright." " Me !" said the
widow, " I never spoke to the man in my life. Borrow five