Three generations

60 BALASS DAYS
11 Bairns, if it does not rain some time, folk will speak
of the long drouth" (drought).
When hard pressed, he could not refuse his young
listeners the treat of hearing him raise his quavering
voice and sing to them the old songs for which he had
been known in his early days. He would give them
Scotland's derision, or the English General on whom
the Jacobite Troops stole a march !
" Hey ! Johnnie Cope, are you wauken yet,
Or are your drums a-beatin' yet ?"
or he would dwell, with peculiar masculine mockery,
on the splendour of the complacent heiress, " Tibby
Fowler of the Glen ":
" Sillar buckles in her shoon,
Cockle-shells would set her better ;
Silly elf, it's for her pelf
That a' the lads are wooing at her."
I can just remember the venerable figure of a big
old man with white hair and a kindly smile, in his
wheeled chair, to which he was bound fast by paralysis
and rheumatism, as he sat in the window of the bright,
cheerful room looking down on the main street of the
little town he had known so well. He had ridden and
run and ruffled with the best there in his day — a man
of substance and influence as his father's heir. With
his handsome person and his frank, honest, kindly
nature, he had been greatly beloved, of whatever faults
or follies he had been guilty. He had a soft spot in
his heart for me, one of his younger grandchildren, as
he had for the girls in the two families who had been
named for his wife. I was one of his own two
" namesakes." The other was a grown-up man when
I was a little child, yet old Harry had been heard to