The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

Willie Gillies. 139
his system of surface draining—his plan of crossing and
weeding flocks, his modes of pasturing, &c., explained to
the world in type. Moreover, the Journal was one of the
few papers he respected, because, he said, it had glimmers
of sense, and did not fill its pages with party " flytings,"
nor with murders and such stuff
" I have," he said, " been trying to make fools listen to
me for twenty years. G ,
if I had a son, I would have
taken their farms at higher rents, and make the land pay
too, and turn the stiff-headed asses into beasts of burden.
It is all they deserve, since they will not listen to reason."
He was getting into one of his crotchets, though, from
what I afterwards learned, I do not believe he would like
to dispossess his neighbours, stiff as they were ; for on a
farm which he bought years before, he allowed a tenant to
remain who put him into periodical fury by refusing to
listen to good advice. But at this time I was not so
acquainted with his empty threats as I subsequently
became, and so, rather than come to a collision respecting
the morality of depopulating a parish for the sake of high
farming, I asked rather awkwardly why he remained a
bachelor ?— for, like myself, only older, bachelor he was,
and that partly explains our sudden intimacy, for birds of
a feather have common sympathies. I repented the
moment I put the question. But he replied quite
unruffled,
" Because I wanted none of your jaunting, pridefu'
dames to spend my money and scorn me, nor when
younger could I think of raising a kitchen-maid to the
head of the table to be laughed at by the whole clanjam-
fray of the country-side. Yet now that I am an old lonely
man, I think my pride was foolish."
" But you will have near relatives to supply the place of
dearer connections. My brother's children are to me as
much, or nearly as much, as children of my own could be."
" No, I have no near kin, if ye must ken, except the
children of a sister who thwarted me, and whom I have
disowned."