Oor ain folk times

250 THE MINISTER'S LEE
took. Even when any of you elder boys came home
for your holidays, or about New Year time, when the
manse was full of rollicking young people, and all. sorts
of toothsome delicacies were in abundance (which was
more frequently the case in later years), papa made very
little change in his habits. He might come downstairs
a little sooner, but he did not sit at table, but in his
easy chair at the fireside, making quaint and humorous
remarks from time to time. At the time I speak of he
was more or less of an invalid and had to be careful.
' He seldom wore a greatcoat or gloves, and looked
with considerable contempt on an umbrella as an
effeminate encumbrance. Like Professor Blackie, he
would have said, " Leave your umbrellas to the hens
and the ladies. I prefer to look Jove in the face, be he
fair or foul."
' I remember two of his stories of Dr. Cruden of
Nigg. The doctor, an unusually godly man, had occa-
sion to reprove a fisherman for telling an untruth, and
incautiously remarked that he himself had never wil-
fully told a lie in his life.
'"Ay, but ye did lee," said the fisherman, " an' that
in the vera poopit ! "
' " Me, John 1 " said the astonished minister. " Ye
must be greatly mistaken."
' " Mistaken here, or mistaken there, sir, — you said
that Nichol Davidson was a ruler amo' the Jews, an' I
ken brawly he's nivver been mair nor five-an'-therty
mile frae the Cove o' Nigg in his life."
' The poor man had mixed up Nicodemus with some
local scion of the clan Davidson.
' Reproving a fisherman for ill-treating his wife, on