YEAR 1761
IT was in this year that the great smuggling trade corrupted all the west
coast, especially the laigh lands about the Troon and the Loans. The tea
was going like the chaff, the brandy like well-water, and the wastrie of
all things was terrible. There was nothing minded but the riding of
cadgers by day, and excisemen by night—and battles between the smugglers
and the king’s men, both by sea and land. There was a continual
drunkenness and debauchery; and our session, that was but on the lip of
this whirlpool of iniquity, had an awful time o’t. I did all that was in
the power of nature to keep my people from the contagion: I preached
sixteen times from the text, “Render to Cæsar the things that are
Cæsar’s.” I visited, and I exhorted; I warned, and I prophesied; I told
them that, although the money came in like sclate stones, it would go
like the snow off the dyke. But for all I could do, the evil got in
among us, and we had no less than three contested bastard bairns upon our
hands at one time, which was a thing never heard of in a parish of the
shire of Ayr since the Reformation. Two of the bairns, after no small
sifting and searching, we got fathered at last; but the third, that was
by Meg Glaiks, and given to one Rab Rickerton, was utterly refused,
though the fact was not denied; but he was a termagant fellow, and
snappit his fingers at the elders. The next day he listed in the Scotch
Greys, who were then quartered at Ayr, and we never heard more of him,
but thought he had been slain in battle, till one of the parish, about
three years since, went up to London to lift a legacy from a cousin that
died among the Hindoos. When he was walking about, seeing the
curiosities, and among others Chelsea Hospital, he happened to speak to
some of the invalids, who found out from his tongue that he was a
Scotchman; and speaking to the invalids, one of them, a very old man,
with a grey head and a leg of timber, inquired what part of Scotland he
was come from; and when he mentioned my parish, the invalid gave a great
shout, and said he was from the same place himself; and who should this
old man be, but the very identical Rab Rickerton, that was art and part
in Meg Glaiks’ disowned bairn. Then they had a long converse together,
and he had come through many hardships, but had turned out a good
soldier; and so, in his old days, was an indoor pensioner, and very
comfortable; and he said that he had, to be sure, spent his youth in the
devil’s service, and his manhood in the king’s, but his old age was given
to that of his Maker, which I was blithe and thankful to hear; and he
enquired about many a one in the parish, the blooming and the green of
his time, but they were all dead and buried; and he had a contrite and
penitent spirit, and read his Bible every day, delighting most in the
Book of Joshua, the Chronicles, and the Kings.
Before this year, the drinking of tea was little known in the parish,
saving among a few of the heritors’ houses on a Sabbath evening; but now
it became very rife: yet the commoner sort did not like to let it be
known that they were taking to the new luxury, especially the elderly
women, who, for that reason, had their ploys in out-houses and by-places,
just as the witches lang syne had their sinful possets and
galravitchings; and they made their tea for common in the pint-stoup, and
drank it out of caps and luggies, for there were but few among them that
had cups and saucers. Well do I remember one night in harvest, in this
very year, as I was taking my twilight dauner aneath the hedge along the
back side of Thomas Thorl’s yard, meditating on the goodness of
Providence, and looking at the sheaves of victual on the field, that I
heard his wife, and two three other carlins, with their Bohea in the
inside of the hedge, and no doubt but it had a lacing of the conek, {17}
for they were all cracking like pen-guns. But I gave them a sign, by a
loud host, that Providence sees all, and it skailed the bike; for I heard
them, like guilty creatures, whispering, and gathering up their
truck-pots and trenchers, and cowering away home.
It was in this year that Patrick Dilworth (he had been schoolmaster of
the parish from the time, as his wife said, of Anna Regina, and before
the Rexes came to the crown), was disabled by a paralytic, and the
heritors, grudging the cost of another schoolmaster as long as he lived,
would not allow the session to get his place supplied, which was a wrong
thing, I must say, of them; for the children of the parishioners were
obliged, therefore, to go to the neighbouring towns for their schooling,
and the custom was to take a piece of bread and cheese in their pockets
for dinner, and to return in the evening always voracious for more, the
long walk helping the natural crave of their young appetites. In this
way Mrs. Malcolm’s two eldest laddies, Charlie and Robert, were wont to
go to Irville, and it was soon seen that they kept themselves aloof from
the other callans in the clachan, and had a genteeler turn than the
grulshy bairns of the cottars. Her bit lassies, Kate and Effie, were
better off; for some years before, Nanse Banks had taken up a teaching in
a garret-room of a house, at the corner where John Bayne has biggit the
sclate-house for his grocery-shop. Nanse learnt them reading and working
stockings, and how to sew the semplar, for twal-pennies a-week. She was
a patient creature, well cut out for her calling, with blear een, a pale
face, and a long neck, but meek and contented withal, tholing the dule of
this world with a Christian submission of the spirit; and her garret-room
was a cordial of cleanliness, for she made the scholars set the house in
order, time and time about, every morning; and it was a common remark for
many a day, that the lassies, who had been at Nanse Banks’s school, were
always well spoken of, both for their civility, and the trigness of their
houses when they were afterwards married. In short, I do not know, that
in all the long epoch of my ministry, any individual body did more to
improve the ways of the parishioners, in their domestic concerns, than
did that worthy and innocent creature, Nanse Banks, the schoolmistress;
and she was a great loss when she was removed, as it is to be hoped, to a
better world; but anent this I shall have to speak more at large
hereafter.
It was in this year that my patron, the Laird of Breadland, departed this
life, and I preached his funeral sermon; but he was non-beloved in the
parish; for my people never forgave him for putting me upon them,
although they began to be more on a familiar footing with myself. This
was partly owing to my first wife, Betty Lanshaw, who was an active
throughgoing woman, and wonderfu’ useful to many of the cottars’ wives at
their lying-in; and when a death happened among them, her helping hand,
and any thing we had at the manse, was never wanting; and I went about
myself to the bedsides of the frail, leaving no stone unturned to win the
affections of my people, which, by the blessing of the Lord, in process
of time, was brought to a bearing.
But a thing happened in this year, which deserves to be recorded, as
manifesting what effect the smuggling was beginning to take in the morals
of the country side. One Mr. Macskipnish, of Highland parentage, who had
been a valet-de-chambre with a major in the campaigns, and taken a
prisoner with him by the French, he having come home in a cartel, took up
a dancing-school at Irville, the which art he had learnt in the
genteelest fashion, in the mode of Paris, at the French court. Such a
thing as a dancing-school had never, in the memory of man, been known in
our country side; and there was such a sound about the steps and
cottillions of Mr. Macskipnish, that every lad and lass, that could spare
time and siller, went to him, to the great neglect of their work. The
very bairns on the loan, instead of their wonted play, gaed linking and
louping in the steps of Mr. Macskipnish, who was, to be sure, a great
curiosity, with long spindle legs, his breast shot out like a duck’s, and
his head powdered and frizzled up like a tappit-hen. He was, indeed, the
proudest peacock that could be seen, and he had a ring on his finger, and
when he came to drink his tea at the Breadland, he brought no hat on his
head, but a droll cockit thing under his arm, which, he said, was after
the manner of the courtiers at the petty suppers of one Madam Pompadour,
who was at that time the concubine of the French king.
I do not recollect any other remarkable thing that happened in this year.
The harvest was very abundant, and the meal so cheap, that it caused a
great defect in my stipend; so that I was obligated to postpone the
purchase of a mahogany scrutoire for my study, as I had intended. But I
had not the heart to complain of this: on the contrary, I rejoiced
thereat; for what made me want my scrutoire till another year, had
carried blitheness into the hearth of the cottar, and made the widow’s
heart sing with joy; and I would have been an unnatural creature, had I
not joined in the universal gladness, because plenty did abound.