A VERY OLD FAMILY.
They were a very old family with whom Snecky Hobart, the bellman,
lodged. Their favorite dissipation, when their looms had come to rest,
was a dander through the kirk-yard. They dressed for it: the three young
ones in their rusty blacks; the patriarch in his old blue coat, velvet
knee-breeches, and broad blue bonnet; and often of an evening I have
met them moving from grave to grave. By this time the old man was
nearly ninety, and the young ones averaged sixty. They read out the
inscriptions on the tombstones in a solemn drone, and their father added
his reminiscences. He never failed them. Since the beginning of the
century he had not missed a funeral, and his children felt that he was a
great example. Sire and sons returned from the cemetery invigorated
for their daily labors. If one of them happened to start a dozen yards
behind the others, he never thought of making up the distance. If his
foot struck against a stone, he came to a dead stop; when he discovered
that he had stopped, he set off again.
A high wall shut off this old family's house and garden, from the
clatter of Thrums, a wall that gave Snecky some trouble before he went
to live within it. I speak from personal knowledge. One spring morning,
before the school-house was built, I was assisting the patriarch to
divest the gaunt garden pump of its winter suit of straw. I was taking
a drink, I remember, my palm over the mouth of the wooden spout and my
mouth at the gimlet-hole above, when a leg appeared above the corner
of the wall against which the hen-house was built. Two hands followed,
clutching desperately at the uneven stones. Then the leg worked as if
it were turning a grindstone, and next moment Snecky was sitting
breathlessly on the dyke. From this to the hen-house, whose roof was
of “divets,” the descent was comparatively easy, and a slanting board
allowed the daring bellman to slide thence to the ground. He had come on
business, and having talked it over slowly with the old man he turned to
depart. Though he was a genteel man, I heard him sigh heavily as, with
the remark, “Ay, weel, I'll be movin' again,” he began to rescale
the wall. The patriarch, twisted round the pump, made no reply, so I
ventured to suggest to the bellman that he might find the gate easier.
“Is there a gate?” said Snecky, in surprise at the resources of
civilization. I pointed it out to him, and he went his way chuckling.
The old man told me that he had sometimes wondered at Snecky's mode of
approach, but it had not struck him to say anything. Afterward, when the
bellman took up his abode there, they discussed the matter heavily.
Hobart inherited both his bell and his nickname from his father, who was
not a native of Thrums. He came from some distant part where the people
speak of snecking the door, meaning shut it. In Thrums the word used is
steek, and sneck seemed to the inhabitants so droll and ridiculous that
Hobart got the name of Snecky. His son left Thrums at the age of ten
for the distant farm of Tirl, and did not return until the old bellman's
death, twenty years afterward; but the first remark he overheard on
entering the kirk-wynd was a conjecture flung across the street by a
gray-haired crone, that he would be “little Snecky come to bury auld
Snecky.”
The father had a reputation in his day for “crying” crimes he was
suspected of having committed himself, but the Snecky I knew had too
high a sense of his own importance for that. On great occasions, such as
the loss of little Davy Dundas, or when a tattie roup had to be cried,
he was even offensively inflated: but ordinary announcements, such as
the approach of a flying stationer, the roup of a deceased weaver's
loom, or the arrival in Thrums of a cart-load of fine “kebec” cheeses,
he treated as the merest trifles. I see still the bent legs of the
snuffy old man straightening to the tinkle of his bell, and the smirk
with which he let the curious populace gather round him. In one hand
he ostentatiously displayed the paper on which what he had to cry was
written, but, like the minister, he scorned to “read.” With the bell
carefully tucked under his oxter he gave forth his news in a rasping
voice that broke now and again into a squeal. Though Scotch in his
unofficial conversation, he was believed to deliver himself on public
occasions in the finest English. When trotting from place to place with
his news he carried his bell by the tongue as cautiously as if it were a
flagon of milk.
Snecky never allowed himself to degenerate into a mere machine. His
proclamations were provided by those who employed him, but his soul was
his own. Having cried a potato roup he would sometimes add a word of
warning, such as, “I wudna advise ye, lads, to hae ony-thing to do wi'
thae tatties; they're diseased.” Once, just before the cattle market, he
was sent round by a local laird to announce that any drover found taking
the short cut to the hill through the grounds of Muckle Plowy would
be prosecuted to the utmost limits of the law. The people were aghast.
“Hoots, lads,” Snecky said; “dinna fash yoursels. It's juist a haver o'
the grieve's.” One of Hobart's ways of striking terror into evil-doers
was to announce, when crying a crime, that he himself knew perfectly
well who the culprit was. “I see him brawly,” he would say, “standing
afore me, an' if he disna instantly mak retribution, I am determined
this very day to mak a public example of him.”
Before the time of the Burke and Hare murders Snecky's father was
sent round Thrums to proclaim the startling news that a grave in the
kirk-yard had been tampered with. The “resurrectionist” scare was at its
height then, and the patriarch, who was one of the men in Thrums paid to
watch new graves in the night-time, has often told the story. The town
was in a ferment as the news spread, and there were fierce suspicious
men among Hobart's hearers who already had the rifler of graves in their
eye.
He was a man who worked for the farmers when they required an extra
hand, and loafed about the square when they could do without him. No one
had a good word for him, and lately he had been flush of money. That was
sufficient. There was a rush of angry men through the “pend” that led
to his habitation, and he was dragged, panting and terrified, to the
kirk-yard before he understood what it all meant. To the grave they
hurried him, and almost without a word handed him a spade. The whole
town gathered round the spot--a sullen crowd, the women only breaking
the silence with their sobs, and the children clinging to their gowns.
The suspected resurrectionist understood what was wanted of him, and,
flinging off his jacket, began to reopen the grave. Presently the spade
struck upon wood, and by and by part of the coffin came in view. That
was nothing, for the resurrectionists had a way of breaking the coffin
at one end and drawing out the body with tongs. The digger knew this.
He broke the boards with the spade and revealed an arm. The people
convinced, he dropped the arm savagely, leaped out of the grave and went
his way, leaving them to shovel back the earth themselves.
There was humor in the old family as well as in their lodger. I found
this out slowly. They used to gather round their peat fire in the
evening, after the poultry had gone to sleep on the kitchen rafters, and
take off their neighbors. None of them ever laughed; but their neighbors
did afford them subject for gossip, and the old man was very sarcastic
over other people's old-fashioned ways. When one of the family wanted to
go out he did it gradually. He would be sitting “into the fire” browning
his corduroy trousers, and he would get up slowly. Then he gazed
solemnly before him for a time, and after that, if you watched him
narrowly, you would see that he was really moving to the door. Another
member of the family took the vacant seat with the same precautions.
Will'um, the eldest, has a gun, which customarily stands behind the old
eight-day clock; and he takes it with him to the garden to shoot the
blackbirds. Long before Will'um is ready to let fly, the blackbirds
have gone away; and so the gun is never, never fired; but there is a
determined look on Will'um's face when he returns from the garden.
In the stormy days of his youth the old man had been a “Black Nib.” The
Black Nibs were the persons who agitated against the French war; and
the public feeling against them ran strong and deep. In Thrums the local
Black Nibs were burned in effigy, and whenever they put their heads
out of doors they risked being stoned. Even where the authorities were
unprejudiced they were helpless to interfere; and as a rule they were
as bitter against the Black Nibs as the populace themselves. Once the
patriarch was running through the street with a score of the enemy at
his heels, and the bailie, opening his window, shouted to them, “Stane
the Black Nib oot o' the toon!”
When the patriarch was a young man he was a follower of pleasure. This
is the one thing about him that his family have never been able to
understand. A solemn stroll through the kirk-yard was not sufficient
relaxation in those riotous times, after a hard day at the loom; and he
rarely lost a chance of going to see a man hanged. There was a good deal
of hanging in those days; and yet the authorities had an ugly way of
reprieving condemned men on whom the sight-seers had been counting. An
air of gloom would gather on my old friend's countenance when he told
how he and his contemporaries in Thrums trudged every Saturday for six
weeks to the county town, many miles distant, to witness the execution
of some criminal in whom they had local interest, and who, after
disappointing them again and again, was said to have been bought off by
a friend. His crime had been stolen entrance into a house in Thrums by
the chimney, with intent to rob; and though this old-fashioned family
did not see it, not the least noticeable incident in the scrimmage that
followed was the prudence of the canny housewife. When she saw the legs
coming down the lum, she rushed to the kail-pot which was on the fire
and put on the lid. She confessed that this was not done to prevent the
visitor's scalding himself, but to save the broth.
The old man was repeated in his three sons. They told his stories
precisely as he did himself, taking as long in the telling and making
the points in exactly the same way. By and by they will come to think
that they themselves were of those past times. Already the young ones
look like contemporaries of their father.