“Sic een!” he kept saying to himself;
“an’ sic sma’ white han’s!
an’ sic a bonny flit! Eh hoo she wad glitter
throu’ the water in a bag net! Faith! gien
she war to sing ‘come doon’ to me, I wad
gang. Wad that be to lowse baith sowl an’
body, I wonner? I’ll see what Maister Graham
says to that. It’s a fine question to put
till ’im: ‘Gien a body was to gang
wi’ a mermaid, wha they say has nae sowl to
be saved, wad that be the loss o’ his sowl, as
weel’s o’ the bodily life o’ ‘im?"’
CHAPTER VI: DUNCAN MACPHAIL
The sea town of Portlossie was as irregular a gathering
of small cottages as could be found on the surface
of the globe. They faced every way, turned their
backs and gables every way—only of the
roofs could you predict the position; were divided
from each other by every sort of small, irregular
space and passage, and looked like a national assembly
debating a constitution. Close behind the Seaton,
as it was called, ran a highway, climbing far above
the chimneys of the village to the level of the town
above. Behind this road, and separated from it
by a high wall of stone, lay a succession of heights
and hollows covered with grass. In front of the
cottages lay sand and sea. The place was cleaner
than most fishing villages, but so closely built,
so thickly inhabited, and so pervaded with “a
very ancient and fishlike smell,” that but for
the besom of the salt north wind it must have been
unhealthy. Eastward the houses could extend no
further for the harbour, and westward no further for
a small river that crossed the sands to find the sea—discursively
and merrily at low water, but with sullen, submissive
mingling when banked back by the tide.
Avoiding the many nets extended long and wide on the
grassy sands, the youth walked through the tide swollen
mouth of the river, and passed along the front of
the village until he arrived at a house, the small
window in the seaward gable of which was filled with
a curious collection of things for sale—dusty
looking sweets in a glass bottle; gingerbread cakes
in the shape of large hearts, thickly studded with
sugar plums of rainbow colours, invitingly poisonous;
strings of tin covers for tobacco pipes, overlapping
each other like fish scales; toys, and tapes, and
needles, and twenty other kinds of things, all huddled
together.
Turning the corner of this house, he went down the
narrow passage between it and the next, and in at
its open door. But the moment it was entered
it lost all appearance of a shop, and the room with
the tempting window showed itself only as a poor kitchen
with an earthen floor.
“Weel, hoo did the pipes behave themsels the
day, daddy?” said the youth as he strode in.
“Och, she’ll pe peing a coot poy today,”
returned the tremulous voice of a grey headed old
man, who was leaning over a small peat fire on the
hearth, sifting oatmeal through the fingers of his
left hand into a pot, while he stirred the boiling
mess with a short stick held in his right.
