Memorials of John Geddes

memorials of 3obn 6«We$.
sevens, like nuts tumbled out of a bag, in admired con-
fusion. There was then (whatever there might have been
in old time), only one great Fair, coming annually in the
end of July and lasting two days, and this fair was held on
the neighbouring hill, called the Glass Market Hill, always
bringing round the same routine of buying, selling, and
hiring, with a dull monotonous uniformity.
For ordinary commercial dealings, there lay adjacent
not one but three market towns — Huntly, Keith, and the
comparatively modern Dufftown — making a circle round
on a radius of seven miles distance, each with its own
attractive influence, but mutually counteractive, so that
Glass suspended, as it were, in equilibrio between the rival
communes, was allowed to form a region by itself, self-
contained, and preserving its own independent type of
peasantry. Agriculture, at the period when our narrative
commences, was still in primitive condition : turnips and
potatoes were only finding their way into the regular
rotation ; the former crop was for a long time sown, not in
drills but broadcast ; threshing-mills were hardly known,
and weary was the work of threshing the corn by the flail
in those days in the early mornings in order to provide the
daily provender of straw for the hungry cattle, a work
which was done by the thump of what Burns calls the
" weary flinging tree " — a slavery from which the farm
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